Shocking!

[Harrison]

Yesterday after work, my brother and I decide to go for a 2 hour sail on our local lake. It's overcast, and threatening to rain, but we go anyway. (were addicted!) Winds are good, and the local sailing school has about a dozen boats doing skills. Winds start to pick up, and we can see the rain getting closer, so we furl the gen. Minutes later, it starts to rain so we decide to call it a day. We drop the main and start to motor in. At this time, we hear a flutter of luffing sails in the distance. We can see a very large gust making its way across the lake. (It got to the sailing school boats before it reached us.) All of our attention is on the struggling small dingys and keel boats, as we watch at least 5 roll and get knocked down. Since we're powered up and in no immediate danger, we head over to offer assistance.

Now comes OUR problem!

As we ask several of them if they need help or a tow, I notice my fish finder screen goes black. I try to re-power it up, and it sends a shock of electricity enough to throw my arm back. At the same time, my motor looses power and stops. (Hmmmm, not too good as I know the wind will blow us to shore in a couple of minutes if we can't get it started!) The motor fires right up, but now we're both aware of the constant sparking we hear coming from the boat. Approx once every second there's a 1 inch arc (spark) occurring between the lifeline and mast the shroud. Big and blue! In fact, we can't touch anything metal on the entire boat. The mast, boom, lifelines, shrouds, everything except the wheel (luckily) is charged, and recharges itself every second! The whole boat is sparking, and stopping my motor. After about 45 min of dealing with this, and waiting for an available space at the dock, we finally get off the lake, with no harm done.

What the heck is going on?
Do I have a serious short in my electrical system? (this never happened before)
We did notice a couple of lightning strikes about 5-10 miles away, could we have gotten surrounded by charged air, or some static condition?
Has this happened to anyone else?
Any thoughts?


Thanks,
Harrison

[Andy26M]

Enough electricity to be causing an arc across an air gap every minute!! It seems like the battery(ies) would be dead real quick...

I would, however, be looking for something to be shorted to the rigging somewhere - I can't see any way that you'd have been absorbing that kind of charge from the atmosphere without seeing it...

- AndyS

[Harrison]

Actually sparking every second, not a min.

[Mark Prouty]

Shorted spark plug wire maybe.

[kmclemore]

Shorted spark plug wire maybe.

That would be my guess as well. There's little else that can generate that magnitude of spark on a boat. Plus coming in a pulsed way, and only every second or so, sounds like just a single wire, not the main coil wire. Also points to a possible problem in the motor's grounding.

I'll certainly defer to our resident expert on electrics, though... Moe?

[Harrison]

I would also agree that a it could be a faulty spark plug wire, however,it continued with the motor off.

---H

[mike]

That is extremely strange... call an exorcist?

--Mike

[waternwaves]

The rain had stopped...

The cold dry wind was blowing hard...

any other clues.........??

[Mark Prouty]

Gotta be careful who ya pi$$ off!

[Harrison]

Rain was just sprinkling.
Yes wind was blowing hard.
Dagger board and rudders down fully.
Both of us wearing white rubber soled water shoes.
No navigation or cabin lights on.
Mast light un-plugged.
The only electrical equipment on (connected to battery) was motor + tach, and fish finder. GPS was on but running on it's own batteries.
Deck of boat was wet.
Boat is new and doesnt have any radio/stereo/antenna installed yet.

. . .. maybe an exorcism is indeed needed

---H

[waternwaves]

Mark..
maybe near a military base??? Check out the reflector size on this puppy... with an effective range of over 10 miles..



one of the side effects of these beasties is nasty electrostatics, dry air becomes very warm....Military Beam weapons

But I am guessing St. Elmos fire
Corona Discharge no, not the beer, or the after effects of it.....

[Mark Prouty]

Discharging an onboard capacitor?

Bender?



Alliens?

[Don B]

None of the other boats that you tried to offer assistance to were experiencing this ?

I think 5 miles away is still close enough to get killed by lightning.

At least down here in Raleigh, NC I think that is what I have heard.

I remember an article in a Trailer Boater magazine that I read years ago. They were out testing a brand new bow rider and it got hit by lightning. It puts holes all through the hull. As I remember the enter and exit holes were above the water line which saved the boat.

It's possible that your boat got charged and it could not discharge for some odd reason until you got it to shore.

-Don B

[Harrison]

None of the other boats that you tried to offer assistance to were experiencing this ?

Not that I'm aware of. If anyone was having similar issues, no one let us know.

---H

[Richard O'Brien]

Been there! It's hard for any one to believe who hasn't experienced it. Now I drag two discharge chains in the water whenever a storm approaches. These aren't for providing a lightning path. they are necc. to discharge the enormous current building up on the rigging. Rather like sailing around in a giant capacitor, Huh? head for port ASAP!!

This is entirely an atmospheric phenomena, and yes You pretty nearly can run your outboard with those big sparks.