Peter Hendra wrote in
:

Could I
attach a cable to that and throwm it ovewr the stern? - or would two
attached to the capshrouds give better protection? I unashamdely admit
to being terrified of being struck again - not a personal fear but one
of having to shell out all those dollars again to replace it all.


Yes, that should work fine as a good static discharge if the solid
backstay is electrically attached to the metal mast. The more paths you
provide to seawater ground from that mast....smooth paths with no hard
angles just to make it look "neat", whatever that means....the better.

There is no such thing as "lightning protection". There is surge
protection and static discharge. Static discharge helps prevent
lightning strikes on anything. The static radiating off things is what
makes the path for the "main bang", hundreds of millions of amps at
hundreds of millions of volts nothing can possibly stop.

If your boat is directly hit by a massive lightning strike, it will be
destroyed, not an issue. However, oddly, not many direct hits happen.
What does happen is static discharges from nearby hits and St Elmo's
Fire, the buildup of static on the rigging not bled off. These
discharges, say from the base of an ungrounded mast, will hole the hull
in a hundred places...sinking the boat.

One of my friends was senior engineer for Dialpage in Charleston. I had
a packet 2 meter ham radio digital station on one of Dailpage's towers,
serving the ham community with packet radio for years.

This tower had 3 candelabra-mounted paging antennas at 330 ft AGL and a
very nice grounding system to bleed off the static charge, done the best
way possible to protect the expensive paging transmitters.

It took a direct hit. The top 8 ft of the tower, along with the entire
candelabra antenna system, SIMPLY VANISHED. Not a trace of it was found
on the ground. The stroke mostly ignored the extensive, professionally-
installed ground system after the stroke turned bridge cables into molten
bits of metal, all the way to bedrock under the tower. After those first
few microseconds, now with no ground system, the stroke entered the
transmitter building, which also had a very extensive, professionally-
installed grounding system to protect everything in the building. Bus
bars that were 1/2" thick copper by 2" wide straps were melted, ripped
out of their mounting brackets by the intense magnetic pulse (EMP) the
stroke caused. Every piece of paging equipment, tower lighting
equipment, emergency and AC power panels, even the big diesel genset
outside on its pad, were utterly destroyed. The huge power cables that
came from the building to the power pole outside were "stretched" by the
current blast that blew the transformers (3 phases) off the pole and
drooped these heavy cables to within a foot of the road they crossed
over.

A boater stands NO chance against such a stroke. Glad it doesn't happen
often, but I cannot imagine why.

WJBF-TV/FM in Augusta, GA, was similarly destroyed by a direct hit a long
time ago. The stroke destroyed the telephone system around the tower
over a diameter of over 4 miles! JBF is Channel 6. A few miles away is
Channel 12's tower...the OTHER part of the path! The stroke hit them
both in a big, grounded loop, simultaneously. One of my old broadcast
buddies, who was the duty engineer at JBF at the time, weighted in around
400 pounds. It blew him right off his chair at the console! The stroke
came out the front panel of the FM transmitter and hit the console he was
sitting at! He came to in time to help put out the fires and get out of
the building. They were off the air for months replacing it
all...melted.

Larry
--
Lightning scares the crap out of me, sitting there in the cockpit at the
base of the big lightning rods, holding onto the metal wheel hooked to
the metal GROUNDED rudder hanging out in the sea, below.....