Caught in storm Lake Erie

I grew up 4 miles away from Lake Erie, and spent a lot of time out on that lake in small boats as a child. I have friends who live near oceans, and they often dismiss the great lakes as insignificant and benign bodies of water. Those lakes will kill you in a hurry if you naively doubt their ferocity, and underestimate their potential.

I heard my Dad tell the man who took us out on his boat we had better head in as he didn't like the look of the clouds that were forming. The owner of the boat said a little rain never hurt anybody. That began a 4 hour battle to get back to our campgrounds on Sandusky bay from Lake Erie. The bay was even raging with the boat hitting the bottom after every wave. Lost boat propeller and had to paddle the rest of the way in, I was a child in the early 1970s but I will always remember sitting with a life jacket on and our moms telling us to pray. My dad was an experienced boater and coast guard and he told me the driver of the boat that day didn't respect the lake, that he didn't get storms can pop up in a matter of minutes on Lake Erie. Growing up on the lake as I did I respected it ever since. The waves on that Lake were incredible. Glad that cabin cruiser we were on held up and I never forgot my Dad's calm demeanor and guidance that day. He was the reason we made it back in one piece.

Thanks for the top notch filming Hellen keller

I'm 52 yrs old and spent my whole life fishing offshore in the Atlantic and the biggest gnarliest waves I've ever seen were on the shore of Lake Ontario. Those lakes don't mess around!

The scary thing about watching this, having sailed on it commercially for years., this was not even anything close to a real Lake Erie storm. All fun and games till you find out fresh water and lungs don't mix.

I an't believe how slow everyone was to react to the captains orders to get the lines and plates back into the boat! This could have been a real disaster!

Bunch of plebs. If weather coming fast and captain worried, cut all the lines, run for home, talk about it in the pub.

Felt like I was watching the 3 stooges go fishing

This guy had no business taking other people out.

How do we know that those storms were forecast for that day?? There are NO other rec boaters in sight! If you don't give the Great Lakes the respect you would give to an ocean, you're asking to become fish bait.... Any "lake" (Superior) that can sink a 700+ foot long freighter ship, before the crew could even scream "mayday" into the radio, is a lake as dangerous as any ocean on the planet (SS Edmund Fitzgerald).

Anyone who disregards Lake Erie's fury is doomed to spend their eternity on the lake bottom...these guys were lucky, plain and simple.

This storm didn't just come out of nowhere. It was a front. Lake Erie can change in minutes, but this type of storm was forecasted. This is just being unprepared and the call for life jackets is was too late.

Wow , still fishing when the storm was on the horizon, this captain is not going to live long, if he keeps this behavior up. Having been caught in a full gale in the days before radio were common it is not something you want to do more than once.

Told to wrap up rods but ignored it until the last minute.

Collective IQ onboard: 6

Wow, 18 minutes managed to get 34 seconds of footage of the actual lake.

A marine radio would have warned you about the approaching storm. The Life jackets should have gone on when you first saw it coming.

Lake Erie is particularly dangerous, not just because of the intense thunderstorms that brew up out of nowhere but because it is so shallow. Shallow bodies of water create square waves when the seas come up as the bottoms, tops of the waves are chopped off by the lake bottom. Square waves are steep. You literally fall off of them. Take a look at shipwreck maps of Erie. It is sobering how many have been lost. p.s. Power boats are like shoe boxes and they are terrible hull forms in any kind of weather.

How is it that the worst camera man in the world keeps sharing videos? lol.

More people died on the Great Lakes in 2016 than any other. I was at my home port this past August when one happened. The Coast Guard helicopter circling the area was a sober reminder of just how much water you are on. In the 45 years I've fished the Great Lakes, I've seen and heard too many incidents that could have and should have been prevented.