"bushman" wrote in
:

Something I come to regret not doing is running a spare pair of
wires
for future use.
- Allen

This is a good time to also mention PUT IN PULL STRINGS
EVERYWHERE YOU EVER PULL A WIRE! God I hate workin' on someone's
boat and have them say, "We had to pull a wire through that awful
place last year."...and the idiot didn't have enough brains to
pull in a string so we didn't have to do the whole thing over
again! Grrrr.....(d^

getting ready for bow to stearn rewiring
Q: are there any problems running one large common ground wire
fore
and aft? -Allen


Question is where. If you run it in the bilge, it'll become part
of the electrolysis problems. Try to keep it as high up in the
hull as possible so it's never laying in the water until the
waves are washing over the sinking hulk. Grounding the rigging
is a great idea, but make sure none of the rigging ever sits in
the seawater and just eats the zincs.

If it's just DC wiring negative return, its path isn't very
important. If this is supposed to be a lightning ground, that's
a different matter. A lightning stroke isn't DC. It's a very
high risetime pulse with lots of RF component. If your ground
has any sharp, oh-so-neat-looking corners, it isn't a lightning
ground, at all. All turns in a lightning ground system must be
made with a large, smooth radius that creates a minimum of
inductance. A wide, flat ground strapping is far superior to a #
0 battery cable as the wide strap's inductance per foot is less,
also. NO SHARP CORNERS, I don't care how neat it looks! The
lightning pulse will just go shooting off the corner of the neat
corner into the cabin...not good.

http://www.thomson.ece.ufl.edu/lightning/SGEB17.html
Thomson, a sailor and electrical engineer in FL, the lightning
capital of the world, wrote this article...