Electric Queensland

We've heard it said that folk up in Queensland are afraid of nothing. (I say "up in Queensland" in the sense that I still imagine myself in my native town of Grafton in New South Wales.) Last January, I referred to the dauntless nature of Queenslanders in blog posts about the gigantic floods that struck the south-east corner of their state.

Today, I want to present an amazing short video that shows boats out on the calm waters of a place called Mooloolaba, just a hundred kilometers to the north of Brisbane. The sky is full of black clouds, and you can hear claps of thunder. Clearly, the fury of a  storm is about to hit the place… and an observer might wonder why people are still out on boats. A non-Queenslander might even say they're crazy. Watch the video to see what happened next.

[Click to watch the YouTube display of the video, which is slightly larger than my embedded blog version. The cries of scared children add an alarming dimension to the situation. What the hell were kids doing out in the middle of an approaching electrical storm such as this?]

A young woman was seated on an esky (plastic container for keeping beer chilled) on the deck on a 15-meter cruiser that can be seen, in the video, receiving the impact of a bolt of lightning. Although the intrepid lady was knocked out by the lightning, she survived miraculously, and has now described her experience to the local media. I already said that they breed 'em tough in Queensland. Apparently they also breed 'em shockproof, in an electrical sense.