Sorry, but it is true. Once lightning hits once, it's not the same place anymore.Dimitri-2000X-Tampa wrote:the odds are in my favor now that I won't get hit again..even though that "lightning never strikes twice in the same place" is a myth because this is the second time I've been hit in about 17 year.
Dimitri-2000X-Tampa wrote:Thanks Obelix, I don't think I've ever seen an M boat around here or on any (local) WCTSS outings so I hope we do get a chance to meet one of these days. I usually attend about half the outings in a year.
I just thought I would close out this thread by thanking Steve and the others who encouraged me to make an insurance claim. You know, living in coastal Florida, I have had such a negative opinion on insurance companies, that I almost made a stupid mistake by NOT filing a claim. The bottom line is that homeowners insurance is a real crock around here, I've already been canceled twice with no good reason (ie. NO claims) and so my homeowners has become a last resort of catastrophic emergency. The premiums have gotten so high that I've had to raise my deductible to ridiculous levels. And the bottom line is that I did not make a claim on the house damage even though it would have ended up being thousands of dollars in damage (especially if I had hired someone to repair it). The other problem is that I progressively found more and more things broken and had already started fixing things before I knew the full extent of the damage. Like for example, my garage door opener, can't live for long without getting the car in and out. But even the repacement cost on my home computer alone was over a thousand dollars (although it was due for an upgrade anyway).
Since it took me a few weeks to even realize the damage to the boat, and since I didn't "have" to go out sailing right away, I took my time with that and made a claim to my insurance company which is progressive (same as I have on my cars). And I just have to say that they were absolutely fantastic about it. They recommended good people to help out (I usually do all my own work to the boat but frankly I was overwhelmed with all the house and boat damage combined and it literally took me over 4 months to recover) and they even paid to have my blown out thru-hull fiberglassed over. They certainly didn't "have" to do this, they could have paid me $100 to put in a new transducer (restoring it to pre-strike) versus paying $500 for fiberglass repair. In the end, with all the blown out electronics and labor charges to replace it, the claim value was over half of the total value of the boat!
The good news is that I'm pretty much all recovered now except for the autopilot which I'm working on currently and I have all brand new electronics in the boat, no more holes in the bottom of the hull and I'm out cruising again. I spent 10 days on my boat in November and am a happy camper. So, it was a heck of a lot of work but now my boat is better than ever, I have all the latest gadgets including some good new safety features like DSC and AIS so its a happy ending. Oh, and I also bought some jumper cables to clip to the shrounds and will most likely keep my boat grounded to the water when its on the lift from now on...so, that changes the way I used to think about lightning grounding too! I do still have to repair the electrical conduit to the house and I'm contemplating how I can put in a grounding rod and additional switch between the house and the dock so that if the lift does get hit again, it can dissipate more energy to ground before it gets to the house, but hopefully, the odds are in my favor now that I won't get hit again..even though that "lightning never strikes twice in the same place" is a myth because this is the second time I've been hit in about 17 years (house not boat - which I didn't own back then) and one friend told me a story of a marina based sailboat that got hit twice in one summer! Oh well, such is life in the lightning capitol of the world.
Yeah…there is a mooring field at the local club (Point Abino) with maybe 100 boats moored less than 100 feet apart. More than half are sailboats, the largest ones further out from shore.Lightning seems to be like a tornado in a trailer park,
Dimitri-2000X-Tampa wrote:Yea Dave, that is the idea..just to attract the lightning off of the side of the boat and into the water, versus it trying to find its way through the cabin and possibly through a human on its way out. But there are also some that believe that a grounded boat is less attractive because it builds less static electricity (like rubbing your feet on the carpet up North in dry weather for example versus having your shoes off)...and I tend to be somewhat of a believer now. We had a big long discussion on this several years ago on this board and I have to confess, I was more in the isolation camp back then...ie, don't ground because it might make your boat more attractive. But now that I've been hit with my boat up in the air on a lift, I've changed my mind..lol And as for stuff being connected or not, I even had a battery powered lantern that seemed to have some switch damage after the strike, and..the transducer which totally blew out (I should post a picture of it) was just trashed, yet the wires that connect it to anything, were disconnected...ie, this was an old transducer no longer in use. But my engine, which was connected to everything does not appear to have suffered any damage at all. I was worried for a while that the diodes and the stator might have been blown out but they seem to be charging the batteries just fine. So, I guess the point is that if you disconnect stuff, you can probably increase your odds a bit, but it is not for sure either. Lightning seems to be like a tornado in a trailer park, some stuff bites the dust, other stuff works fine. In my case though, most everything electric got fried and all the switches in the panel were off (open).
And don't forget that it blew breakers in all 3 of my house panels yet still damaged all kinds of stuff in the house too, some of it at least a hundred feet away from the dock. So even though I intend to install a double pole switch between the dock and the house as well as an additional grounding rod into the ground near the dock, that still doesn't guarantee that lightning won't jump it. On my boat lift switch (which was powered off and open), the burn marks were evident where the lightning jumped over the open switch terminals...and that had to be replaced. One of the lift motors I had to replace didn't have any burn marks at all but kept blowing breakers everytime I engergized it after the strike. I took it to a motor shop and they said they couldn't see any damage to the coils yet it was drawing double the power it was supposed to and was therefore as good as a boat anchor....its strange stuff.
