Frank Ramsey is plenty used to being in harm’s way, a product of a 20-plus year career in the U.S. Army. However, nothing prepared him for what he experienced the morning of day 2 of the Grand Lake Central Rayovac Series last Friday.
Ramsey and his co-angler Kurt Landversicht were fishing a remote stretch of the Elk River when they got caught in a frightening thunderstorm during which multiple lightning strikes in their vicinity took out Ramsey’s trolling motor and electronics.
At one point, during the height of the intense lightning and rain, Landversicht thought Ramsey had been struck himself. Fortunately, he wasn’t, but Ramsey said he did experience temporary numbness in his left arm and hand after one of the nearby strikes.
“I cannot express how fortunate we were,” Ramsey told BassFan Tuesday. “Now that it’s been a few days, I can look back and say we were two very lucky individuals.”
Ramsey, who lives in Illinois but spends most of his time in Texas, wasn’t plugged into the sight-fishing bite on day 1 and caught 3-08 and found himself near the bottom of the standings. Knowing everyone would be in a hurry to start day 2 (the start of day 1 had been delayed by fog) with a storm front bearing down on northeastern Oklahoma, he figured he’d be in good shape if he headed back into the Elk River.
“We were all looking at the radar and I figured since we were going northeast and running away from it, we’d miss it,” he said. “I felt for the guys going south. They were going into it.”
He received alerts from a weather app on his phone about 10 minutes after getting to his spot, indicating the path of the storm had shifted.
“The radar showed we were trapped,” he said. “We were out of options and we did our best to hunker down. We were pinned in the back of the river system. We were at the terminal stage of navigable waters and we were out in the open.”
There was no shelter nearby (boat docks, etc.) and they were hemmed in between a bluff wall and mud bank.
“You could feel the electricity in the air,” Ramsey said. “I’d never seen such intense lightning. Every time we turned around, there was another blast.”
The storm also brought intense rain and visibility was near zero.
“I was on the front of the boat running the trolling motor to keep us off the rocks,” Ramsey said, “when all of sudden lightning hit the rock bank and a tree up there. People who say lightning doesn’t make noise don’t know anything. I can’t describe the sound it made, but it hit the rock bank and threw rocks at the boat. We thought the tree was going to fall on us.”
The closeness of the strike made Ramsey’s boat go haywire. His trolling motor got stuck on maximum speed and there was no way to dial it back. His electronics were blinking non-stop.
“No adjustments would work,” he said. “We shut everything down and got the boat settled down and then we started to realize how lucky we were. There were wood chips and rocks in the boat. That’s when reality set in.”
There was no hull damage that he could tell, but it was about then that he realized his left hand and part of his arm were numb.
“It must’ve gone through me a little bit,” he added.
After a while, the storm subsided and he was able to fire up his outboard and run back to the ramp in Grove.
“We were done,” he said.
Ramsey drove to south Texas afterward to have his boat looked at in advance of another tournament he’s fishing this weekend at Falcon Lake. All told, his trolling motor had to be overhauled, his charging system had to be replaced and one of his bilge pumps burned up during the storm. Six fuses were also blown.
“Everything that blew during the storm was running reverse current afterward,” he said.
The boat and accessories can always be fixed or replaced, he said. He’s just thankful he and Landversicht escaped without serious injury.
“My co-angler thought I was dead,” Ramsey said. “He said I was engulfed by it. It took me a while to get my coherence back to know where I was at. It was an experience.
“It’s not that we were trying to be heroes and fish through it. We were trapped. I’m a retired solider. I didn’t survive 22 years in the military to die on a lake.”
