Fishing in Thunder and Lightening

[Gerry Zagorski]

Last few posts about the weather forecasts always being wrong brought up a memory when they were right for once...

Me and brother Joe decided to head out even though the forecast had some scattered thunderstorms in it. We stayed close and fished the Hook just in case. The afternoon came around and so did the storm cells. Although they weren't big widespread storms, we had a small but intense cell pass close to us. Not a lot of wind or rain but some pretty loud cracks of thunder an lightening. We stopped fishing for a bit since we figured it wouldn't be smart having 7 foot lightening rods in our hands and took cover under our hard top to wait it out.

Joe says to me "Your hair is standing straight up" and I look over at him and say "So is yours"... Then we start hearing this strange crackling and hum noise coming from the hard top and see this wild looking blue and orange glow ball the size of a beach ball at the base of the VHF antenna mount. It's the weirdest thing I ever seen and looked like something out of a Sifi movie.

As a precaution, we kept low in the boat, turned all the electronics off, did not touch anything metal and other than having to change my underwear the storm passed uneventfully. Later after doing some reading, I found out we got really close to taking a lightening strike with all the static that was in the air and the blue glow which has been know to happen on boats and planes.

Here's a good article if you ever get caught out in a storm https://www.boatingmag.com/surviving...ile-boating-0/