Re: what happens when struck by lightening on boat?
I've never seen a boat hit by lightening, but I have seen a parked airplane get hit and my house was hit a couple of years ago.
The airplane was a light, single engine Piper. The entry/exit points were one of the prop blades and the rim of the nose gear tire. There was a small "melt point" on both the blade tip and the rim. In an aircraft, the practical effect of those things getting hit, is to cause both to have to be removed. Both might have been repairable - I'm not sure what the end result was. The most impressive part of the event, was that about a two foot diameter section of pavement overlay, literally exploded. We watched it all fly up in the air, from about 100 feet away!
The hit on my house scared the heck out of me! I had my then 2 year old in my arms and was just entering the front door. The strike was on the side/rear of the house. Since the strike was nearly on top of us, the sound and the flash occurred simultaneoulsy. It was deafening! It also made our hair stand - mostly body hair, but the hair on my head felt like it had a static charge too. My poor little guy was screaming - all I could do was wrap him in my arms, hustle the rest of the way into the house and keep telling him everything was OK. I think he screamed for ten minutes!
As I later discovered, the copper ground wire that comes out of the main electrical box on the house, had been knocked loose by a lawn mower. Because of this, a few things were "cooked." I did have high quality surge suppressors on most of my electronics, so I didn't lose them. On the other things, everything that had a power supply was toast. Things like battery chargers for my power tools, etc., were dead meat!
The worst part, was that I had just purchased and set up a $2,000 computer for photo editing, a few months before.I thought I had things covered, because I had a $300 UPS/battery backup between it and the wall power. Guess what - those things don't work worth a damn when the ground isn't connected (duh!). The warranty that they offer is also void in that case. One other lesson that I learned, is that you should never leave an external hard drive (backup) hooked to your computer via a USB cable. Yup, that's right, the backup fried too!
The good news is that I did not lose my monitors. Generally, you don't hook monitors to a battery backup, because they will run it down quickly. For this reason, I had them running through a high quality surge protector made by Acoustic Research - the same folks that make audio speakers. All I can say is that those things are worth their weight in gold - nothing that was running through one was damaged!
Additional good news is that I finally got all my old work off of the fried computer. While I knew that the backup was trash and most of the components in the puter (motherboard, power supply, etc. were gone, the internal hard drive actually survived. As of a couple of days ago, its been retrieved, loaded onto my current computer and backed up to an external - which now gets disconnected after every backup!
I think I've had my fair share of "fun" with lightening strikes - I'll pass on the boat version, TYVM!
