Surviving Thor’s fury
Lightning strikes on boats are relatively rare around New Zealand, but no one is immune, as this mid-pacific tale underscores.
Lightning strikes on boats are rare around New Zealand, but no one is immune.
We were still 400 miles away W from the Marquesas Islands on our Pacific crossing when I woke to the beating sound of heavy rain. A storm was building and I could tell the lightning was getting closer as it streaked across in defined, jagged lines.
While I made my rounds, checking all of Shapeshifter’s hatches, catches and valves, Colin our skipper set our autopilot. Colin had recently christened it ‘Einstein’ because it was “bloody brilliant.” I said maybe we should call him, ‘Ironarmed Einstein,’ referencing how he played the boat with his linear actuator, back and forth like Einstein’s violin bow.
I looked at the plotter screen at the nav station. Two amoeba storm cells had merged together and we were now in the dead centre of a larger storm eight miles in diameter. My eyes darted to the window as it flashed with a nearby lightning strike, illuminating the sea as clear as day.
The colour had changed from its usual royal blue to a sickly lime green, accented by whitecap stripes. I grabbed our log book and jotted down our coordinates and course since it was the top of the hour – 23h00.
We kept the log book for situations just like this: in case we suddenly lost our instruments. I breathed a sigh thinking about the phrase that had become somewhat of a boat motto: ‘shit only happens at night.’
I popped open the door to the rear toilet and found I’d forgotten to close its hatch. A large pool of rain water sloshed around the floor drain. I ran the drain pump to empty the bulk of the water before grabbing a towel to clean up the rest. I was nearly finished wiping it up when a furious arc illuminated the sea and found our tiny mast.
I lost all vision beyond a blinding white light. A sound like a shotgun exploded in my ear and I lost all sense of time. Weeks could have passed in that split second. I couldn’t tell if I was sitting, standing or even alive. For all I knew I was already in heaven’s sitting room waiting for my number to be called.
At the helm, Colin was having a very similar experience, losing sight of the wheel and the