We tend to all think lightning won't strike our own boats, but what if it did? What would you do? Here's an interesting article from Don Margraf at Sailing Magazine about the worst-case scenario and how to prepare yourself for it. He reminds us that when it comes to lightning, "the odds are not in your favor."
"Recently I received a phone call from a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest landfall. The boat had been struck by lightning and the autopilot, chartplotter and navigations instruments were all wiped out. Serendipitiously, the satellite phone remained unscathed. I was able to help the crew, made up of good sailors who were familiar with the boat, navigate by dead reckoning from my desk 3,000 miles away. It was an important lesson on lightning damage: You never know what or how much will be damaged in a lightning strike and in today’s digital age, there’s nothing more basic than a cell phone.
"To truly understand lightning and make a strategy for safe sailing, the best place to start is the fine print in your insurance policy. If your deductible is double or more for lightning claims, it should tell you that lightning finds the most expensive stuff to demolish. If your policy completely rules out certain locations and times of year, the obvious conclusion is some places have a lot of lightning and you should stay out of a storm.
"If you keep reading the fine print, you will find thousands of pages of lightning science and reporting. Read enough of it and you will finally conclude that scientists still disagree about lightning, but insurance companies do not: Lightning is dangerous."
