Back in the day I used to be the range master for our local club. Most weekends we'd open the range to the public, during the week the local police academy and departments used it.
Back in March of 1993 we got a monster cold front (
1993 Storm of the Century). Gotta love the media! (laughing). Anyway, I was supposed to open the range that morning. Except that we'd had tornadoes hopping and skipping all over North Florida in the night and when I got up just after dawn the wind was a steady 40mph at 40 degrees F and very damp. Floridians do not generally have gear for those kinds of wind chill values!
As you might expect we didn't have any power that morning, an oak tree had crossed my roof in the night on its way to parts unknown, and neither did much of the rest of the area. A buddy and fellow range officer phoned to say he was heading into town for supplies and offered to pick me up on his way. I said I'd go, but we had to go to the range first to put up a sign saying we wouldn't be opening that day. He was incredulous that anyone would want to shoot in those conditions, but I said it could be the Fimbulwinter and someone was gonna want to shoot! So, we drove to the other side of town to the range out at the airport and sure enough there was a fella there waiting in his pickup truck for me to open the gate! The wind was blowing 40mph across the target lanes so I asked him how he was going to compensate for the windage! I had to get some bailing twine to literally stitch the sign to the fence because the wind ripped off my first two attempts.
Having closed the range for the day we realized there was a gun show at Steinbrenner's Ramada in Ocala that day so we set out to go. About thirty miles more or less from Gainesville to Ocala down I-75. Remember the tornadoes? In five different places tornadoes had snapped off the big billboard signs at the ground then dropped them into the traffic lanes so everyone was having to weave around them. Finally got to Ocala only to discover a tornado had hit the hotel. It's a big L-shaped building, but the show was in a separate building inside of the L. The tornado hit the outside of the leg of the L, jumped the gun-show building, then hit the outside of the foot of the L before crossing the highway to tear up another big sign, a gas station, jumped the Interstate and tore up a bunch of pines. The gun show was intact, but there was no power so it was closed for the day.
This is Florida so shooting in the heat is no big deal. Thunderstorms are common so we would wait them out in the covered area and hope the lightning didn't hit too close. Reasonable cold weather was not a problem, but 40mph wind across the firing lines at 40 degrees was beyond the pale!
