Fishing

Strike Zone

Avoid lightning or it may ruin more than your fishing day

Kevin Dunn had bad timing. An experienced boater, he, his wife and another couple, were returning from an offshore trip in the Gulf of Mexico a few summers ago when they ran into a nasty storm. Before they could reach Alligator Point marina on Florida's Big Bend Coast, the storm bore down. Dunn tried to steer the 20-foot center console around the growing system, but it trapped them. Suddenly one of the fiberglass outriggers exploded with the thunderous crack of lightning.

Dunn couldn't release his hands from the metal steering wheel for several moments. His friends received painful jolts from a console railing. The lightning arced through the cockpit and exited into the water via the downrigger cable, shearing off the ball; the remainder of the cable was welded into a solid mass. The bolt blew out the engine rectifier and destroyed the boat's wiring, switches and gauges, rendering it inoperable. Dunn was disoriented for several minutes, but no one suffered permanent injury. The outcome could have been much worse.

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"We were lucky," Dunn said of his ordeal. "Nobody got seriously hurt."

As this crew regrettably found out, lightning is a serious threat to anglers. In the U.S., 67 people are killed in an average year by lightning on land and water, more than the average number from tornadoes or hurricanes. Many more lightning-strike victims survive, but some are left with lingering maladies like numbness, memory loss and muscle spasms.

Juice on the loose

According to the National Weather Service and other storm resources, lightning-an abrupt natural discharge of electrical energy in the atmosphere-starts 15,000 to 25,000 feet above sea level in cumulonimbus clouds.

The charge works its way down from the cloud through the atmosphere forming a "charged channel" until it makes a connection with an object on the ground or water. When that happens, the circuit is complete and the electrical charge-with the potential of up to 100 million volts-is transferred to ground.

Remarkably, the scientific community does not agree on the origins of the charges that become lightning, but we all know the results. The air surrounding a lightning strike is heated to 50,000 degrees and this rapid heating produces first shock waves, then sound waves in the form of thunder.

Clouds that produce lightning are formed by a combination of upward movement, instability, moisture and cold temperatures in the upper atmosphere, conditions that normally occur in the summer.