The Great Wander

I’ve heard, mostly on TV or social media, people who were near lightning strikes say that the hair on the back of their neck stood up.  Or one guy told me his friend’s hair was sticking straight up right before lightning struck nearby.  I’ve never experienced that.  Of course, I don’t know if I’ve ever been that close to lightning before either…until a few weeks ago.

We had a really nice thunderstorm roll in a few weeks ago.  Thunder, lightning, rain.  It brought the temperatures down a bit.  I started cooking dinner during the storm while Sandy and Matthew checked hatches and a few other things.  After about 15 minutes of thunder and lightning off in the distance, there was a loud crack and boom really close to the boat and all of the sudden I saw a flash of a blue ball of light in the middle of the salon.  “WTF was that?!” We all said at about the same time. 

None of us knew right away what it was but, it didn’t take long to figure out our boat had been hit by lightning.  Lights went out, volt meters quit and none of it was coming back.  We spent the rest of the night really shaken up.  It was terrifying.  I did manage to finish dinner so that we could eat, but that was about all I could get done.

The next day we found out that our GFI on the dock needed replacing, probably because of the lightning strike, so we couldn’t completely assess the damage until we could start to charge our batteries again.  Only, part of the damage was we couldn’t charge our batteries anymore because the charger was gone.  I went to start the engines and found out the alternators were taken out, along with our navigation electronics.  Several days later we found out that something was really wrong with our wires, since our fridge was running without the breaker being on. 

When lightning strikes a sailboat, it travels down the mast, through the shrouds, and in our case then down the grounding wires to a grounding plate in the hull.  Of course, the electricity still travels through a lot and can cause significant damage, not just to electronics but also to the rigging.  We’ve got some calls in to see about getting our rigging inspected as well, though I don’t know that we took a direct hit.

We have had an electrician inspect the electrical system and once the electrician looked at the panel, he saw wires blown out of the back of the panel, along with fuses welded in place.  Basically, after he looked at the boat, his report was that everything needed to be replaced from bow to stern.  So, we have been working with insurance to cover the cost of the damage and the electrician.  Hopefully, this week we will be able to get the work started.

The last several weeks, while we’ve been working on that, we’ve been without out power and running water on the boat.  Thankfully, the lounge has showers.  We’ve been able to use the fridge-freezer by keeping it stocked with ice and putting food in there. 

Plans have obviously changed.  We will no longer be sailing north to explore New England, it’s only short time till Thanksgiving, so once we can move again, we will head south and explore the Keys and probably head over to the Bahamas. 

This setback has a been a hard one.  More than once we’ve looked at each other and said, “Is it time to cut our losses and do something different?”  Usually, it’s not at the same time and each of us talks the other off the ledge of trying to sell the boat and ending the whole adventure.  Sometimes we both are on the ledge at the same time and decide that we can’t really sell the boat until it’s fixed, so then we might as well sail for a bit.  It’s been hard.  This is a part of boat life that no one can prepare you for.  You can tell someone that this might happen, but you can’t really prepare them for it.  It’s one of those things that you have to experience to determine if you can push through the set back.  For now, we are hanging in there.  All three of us looked out at the ocean a few days ago and said, “I want to be out there.”  So, we are still going to make that happen.