Lightning Hit My Boat!

Well, an interesting weekend that I may have to spread over two posts.

Early Friday evening, before dark, an intense, and thankfully brief, thunderstorm rolled right over our island. Being on the lee of the island, it makes it hard to see these things coming. I was standing on our veranda when my sailboat, which is moored about a hundred feet from where I was standing was hit by lightning. I wasn't looking in that direction on at the time. I just saw and heard the simultaneous boom and my first response was literally duck and cover, and then get the hell inside. A number of neighbours saw it hit the boat and reported seeing welding like sparks flying off.

Needless to say, this got me a bit concern so when the storm had passed I went out to investigate. It was immediately obvious the main halyard had broken. It is a metal cable which runs up the mast and it was melted from it's top most point. Otherwise, everything else seemed okay and, since it would be getting dark soon, I decided further inspection would have to wait until tomorrow, starting with taking down the mast.

First off, other than scorch marks in various locations (that I'll get to), the boat was fine. The block (pulley) for the halyard that is at the top of the mast is nylon and I suspected it would be a useless blob. It was fine. There was scorching all around it (obviously the point of impact) but the block itself was completely intact. What's interesting is that you can follow the scorch marks and determine the path the electricity took to the ground.

I noticed minor scorch marks around the bottom of the bow plate, at the bottom of the forestay, at the very front of the boat. So some charge went this way where it either traveled along the wet painter (bow line) or, more likely I think, jumped the gap to the anchor chain. There was significant scorching around the goose-neck and where the boom rests on its crutch. The head of the crutch is plastic, so the charge likely jumped the gap, went into the crutch (which has a heavy, galvanized, steel pipe inside) and, perhaps, out the bottom of the boat through the half inch or so of fiberglass and wood that makes up the hull. But then again, maybe not. There was not evidence of any marks at the bottom of the crutch, which actually sits on a one inch block of wood too.

I didn't notice this until the next day, but I found perhaps the most scorching around the gudgeons and pintels that attach the rudder to the boat's transom. Perhaps this is where most of the charge left the boat. For this, though, it would have had to jump the gap between the end of the boom and the rudder head. Pretty impressive.

Anyway, the end result is the boat is out of commission until I can get a new halyard, which I can get from a store in Peterborough. So it shouldn't be a problem. There was a sailing race on Sunday, so Michael and I decided to rig up a couple of Laser's instead, but that story will have to be pending for my next post.

Oh, I should add that a minute later another bolt hit the metal roof of my brother-in-law's cottage (you can see the scorch mark) and our satellite modem got completely roasted. It seems the charge didn't go through the power cord (where the serge protector would have helped) but instead up the Ethernet cable - ouch! The power transformers for the two routers are also pooched, but where holding off buying new routers until we get a new modem which is owned by the ISP and may be covered under warrantee. Either way, it looks like know Internet at the cottage for a while so I'm back home in Peterborough now.

Aw well!

Mike