lighting arrester

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C

coffee

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Nov 22, 2004
5
- - chesapeake, MD
does anyone out there have a view on lighting arresters on sailboats? i have heard that they work well, that they attract lighting, and that they have no effect at all. i wanted to put one on my new boat, but right now i am confused.
 
R

Randy Thies

have one on a C 34

Hi Coffee, We have one of the lightening arresters on Voyager. Everything looks well connected to the keel bolts. Cruising in Florida and the Bahamas for 5 years we of course ran into alot of lightening. I swear in a spin off storm of Charlie we had lightening hit within feet of the boat as the noise was deafening and the crackle just prior to the hit made our hair stand on end. Some times it's proving the negative. A boat next to us at the Conch Inn was hit two years ago, and again, was it luck or the arrester. I too had heard that it makes strikes more likely but with all our close calls we have not been hit. But I felt better knowing that if we were hit, we might have been in better shape with the arrester than without. I am thinking I won't put the "sparkler" back on when we re step the mast after shipping her to the Northwest as there's not alot in the way of lightening, at least not like in the SE!
 
A

Al Carlson

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Jun 28, 2004
8
Catalina 36mkII Orange Beach, Alabama
Please, please, it's a Static Discharger!

Hey Coffee: We have one too, and in four years of bad electrical storms on the Alabama Gulf, we have not been hit. Like Randy, we have had close calls, but the boat has never been hit. The theory is that the multiple pointy wires cause the positive charge on your boat (which builds up when a big negative charge moves in overhead) to be dissipated in all directions, thus preventing one large positive-ion streamer forming off the top of your mast and heading straight up to the cloud, thus facilitating a negative lightning stroke to follow the streamer back down from the cloud to your mast. The only lightining damage to our boat happenned when the pole transformer out on the street was hit, and a very large surge came into our house wiring, and also went down the shore power cable and went aboard the boat. On the boat we lost two GFI AC outlets, the microwave, the inverter, and we had to relocate the autopilot's fluxgate compass (the lightning surge magnetized a bunch of stuff near the shore-power wiring). Fair winds and gentle seas, Al Carlson Wings of Dawn C36 # 2059
 
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