On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 04:52:20 GMT, "Michael Daly"
wrote:

On 28-Jul-2003, "David J. Van den Branden" wrote:

If you are far from shore and cannot make it to shelter, the best thing to
do is to get the group all rafted together for additional stability. Stow
your paddles and undo your spray skirts. Hunker down as low as you can in
your cockpit with your head firmly between your legs. Now kiss your ass
goodbye.

Alternatively, you can look at sailboats, with tall aluminum masts that are
grounded to the keel, and remember that they rarely get struck by lightning
even though they spend a great deal of the time on water (under sail or in
harbour). Since they are not at serious risk, neither are you in a kayak.

I lived for sometime on a 35 ft sailboat (too large to haul out of the
water frequently) in North Carolina (where thunderstorms occur on a daily
basis in the summer) that had an aluminum mast that was not bonded or
grounded in any way to the keel. (As a matter of fact, the mast only went
to the coachroof, it was not stepped through to the keel.) I had my VHF
radio antenna on top of that. I know I was struck by lightning several
times, with sometimes some damage to the antenna but never to the boat
itself. There were oodles of theories about lightning and masts at the
time, I'll bet they still exist.

Nowadays I live in Florida, where we get more lightning than any other
state. There are several research stations and university departments and
doctors involved in the study of lightning. Long story short, they tend to
disagree about even the fundamentals. Lightning involves extremely high
voltages, amperages, temperatures, etc. and no one really knows what to
make of it all.

There are oodles of theories about what to do during a thunderstorm. They
range from fairly common sense stuff (don't stand under a lone tree on a
hill) to the rather hard to do "anticipatory hop," where you jump into the
air right before a lightning strike.

While I'm certainly not going to disparage any safety advice (I know if I
did someone would go out and get fried *just that way* the weekend after),
I will say that aside from the general stuff I just don't think an
individual can modify (either by stance or use of equipment) a lightning
strike. I'm sure that there are folks that swear standing on a PFD has
worked for them. Praying real hard to Thor has always worked for me.

Don't take storms lightly, but don't get overly paranoid.

Good advice.

Galen Hekhuis NpD, JFR, GWA
A penny saved gathers no moss