Hail the size of fish
Somewhere in Australia there is a fishing guide looking into the heavens saying, “That’s not what I meant.”
When I was guiding in remote Alaska, there were a few occasions when I asked for a little divine intervention to save a slow or, dare I say it, fishless day. But I never expected fish to fall from the sky. In Lajamanu, a tiny remote village in Australia’s outback, that’s exactly what happened recently. On what was an otherwise normal day, the town’s residents stepped outside to see “hundreds and hundreds” of spangled perch falling from the sky. Some of the fish, according to the folks that witnessed the miraculous event, were still alive as they reached the ground.
A hundred years ago, this event would have went down in the history books as a fete of divine intervention — surely at the hands of some over-pious fisherman. But today, meteorologists have a logical explanation.
They blame a tornado. The scientific folks say it is not uncommon for tornadoes to cross a body of water and suck up some of its swimming life forms. When it happens, the air currents can hold onto the fish for quite some time, often dropping them more than a hundred miles from their home waters. Oddly enough, fish are not the only things tornadoes like to toss about. There are reports of coins, birds and even golf balls raining from the clouds.
Imagine that, hail the size of golf balls — wait, those are golf balls!
As for the fish, I still say some desperate angler had something to do with the situation.
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