"Of insurance claims for vessels damaged by lightning, 25% of come from vessels in the Chesapeake Bay"

A collection of some of Makara's electronics destroyed by lightning

On the surface it was just another in a string of "work" days, enjoying Makara and getting her ready for our eventual departure. The weather was great and as we were pulling into the marina, after overnighting and Judy's Mom's house, we thought that even be a nice sail might be in the offing.

On arrival Nancy, as usual opened up Makara and checked the batteries. Normally the batteries only drop down a few percent between visits and low batteries would indicate bilge pump action. Honestly I don’t think I have ever even heard ours go on, Makara is that dry, but if a small leak had occurred then the bilge pumps might draw down the batteries a little. A large leak, on the other hand, would be easy to notice even before getting to the boat, as usually it is underwater by the time you get there.

This time the voltage was low. Hmmm, did we leave a light on again? No, that was not possible as the DC panel was completely off as per our departure check list. Perhaps a new piece of electronics had been mis-installed and depleted the batteries? OK, let’s get them charged. So we went about getting the AC on.

The second indication of something amiss occurred after I flipped on the dock power. I called below for Nancy to confirm the dock power AC light was on. It wasn’t. Very odd indeed! Turns out the circuit breaker connected to the dock power was tripped. That's funny, it's kind of hard to do that when the dock power breaker was off.  At this point we had more questions than answers. We now had AC to the boat and were about to activate the charger when we reexamined the battery monitor and an immediate flag went up. The voltage was low, I mean real low. This should have alerted us right away, given our bad experiences with electrical systems on Perigail, but it didn’t. Holy cow boat girl, how do you get 6 volts out of a 12 volt system? At this point we were getting nervous. Breaker off inexplicabley, battery monitor more scambled than eggs at breakfast. We decided to systematically check the other gear to see what else was amiss. At this point we didn't have a clue as to what was going on. To make life more pleasant during this investigation we decided to fire up some music on the stereo. The stereo was dead as well. At this point we had a very sinking feeling in our stomachs... lightning strike.

At least once in the last few weeks while we were away from Makara preparing our house for sale (yes we are getting serious), there were vicious lightning storms in Annapolis. I guess we drew the short straw during one of those stroms. A deck inspection and gander up the rig with binoculars showed no outward signs of a direct strike. But EMP (ElectroMagnetic Pulse) from a lighting strike can destroy electronics even if the lightning only hits the water (or another boat!) close to you. We starting checking things out. While the PC worked, which was amazing, the Ethernet switch just ahead of it was completely fried. As it eventually turned out everything except the control heads of the stereo system were bricked. That was very sad as we just got it finished last session! The Raymarine instruments had big issues and have turned into a complex diagnosis problem with multiple failures. We had one of our cabin overhead lights LED section blown. Several LEDs were found blown in the main breaker panel. Also the Computank display was gone. Upon checking the radios it was eventually determined the ICOM 604 was a brick as well, but thankfullly the much more expensive SSB radio was OK. Oddly enough the bilge pumps were OK, but get this, we have one of the two bilge pumps wired with an alarm and the alarm buzzer got fried! The randomness of the failures was truely disheartening.

While we were initially devastated we quickly went into triage and repair mode - which was a pretty major event in that it involved pulling the boat from the water to insure that their was no hull damage (as required by our insurance). Fortunately for us we had planned a haul out for about this time to do some needed bottom work, re-zinc and addition of a thru-hull for the water maker. A few pictures of what is involved can be found in the Gallery.

This turned into a fairly extensive 3 week period out of the water. The good news is that Makara's hull was not damaged by lightning but we wanted to take advantage of having the boat out of the water to put her back into "like new" condition with fresh coats of paint on her bottom, varnish (actually Cetol) on her teak railing, and a washing her hull. As the work progressed it was gratifying to have many people stop by and comment spontaneously "what a beautiful boat that is".

Once most of the lightning damage was repaired we also managed to get an important, and long standing task complete, a home for our custom cast bell. With the help, once again, of the metal magicians at Kato Marine our bell was mounted in place on the arch. A proper place for the bell is at the stern of the boat and already the bell is beginning to take on a nice patina. While we were at it we also took this opportunity to install the solar panels on the arch, a project that has been on our endless list for almost a year. Both are now in place and are generating power from the sun. In a later "what works" mini article we will provide the details on this installation.

Makara is now safely back in the marina, and although this was an expensive and painful experience, it has taught us that we have a solidly made vessel which will take us anywhere, and soon we hope that we too will soon be "gone in a flash.