What a day yesterday! The sail was great, in the morning
we went to Marina Bay ,
enjoyed a nice lunch on the boardwalk and some paintings
were good at the art show. So far, so good, right?
Sounds like our usual fun and relaxing time on the waters
between friends. Yes, until we got the thunderstorm
above us. Ah yes! But what were we doing on the
water at that time? The skipper (that would be me) must
be nut, right?
Yes, we knew there were going to be potential thunderstorms
in the afternoon. We called the sailing club and heard
the latest radar and Doppler predictions in early afternoon
from Marina Bay . We were told the front was coming and
was going to stay probably until late evening. That’s
why we decided to make it back as quickly as we could as
it is really a quick sail. It started to rain on
us when we were passing the JFK library. We were
entering the harbor, passing Castle Islands when a heavy,
thick fog hit us while the rain went on.
Unfortunately
we didn’t have a horn on our boat, nevertheless
we put up our radar reflector and stayed as close
to the coastline as we could safely. We
also saw several ferries in the middle of the channel and
none of them were using their horn either! Anyway,
we were passing the World Trade center, the ICA and the
court house when the fog cleared a bit and finally we
had the vision of the Boston marina. We were so happy to
have made it almost home. Then the first
lightning touched nearby the courthouse on the seaport
district. We heard the thunder at the same time the lightening
stuck the ground, prompting me to say “Wow, the thunderstorm
is really close, let’s not touch anything in metal.” I
then stopped touching the railing at that point and was
only standing on the plastic benches, holding the helm
while trying to maintain my balance.
The 2nd lightening
came very quickly. Louise got hit on her hand and
arm via her finger touching a piece of metal. I got hit
as I was holding the tiller against me for stability, and
the extension of the tiller is metal and it was
folded on the wood part of the tiller and was thus touching
or close to my soaked wet body.
A burning pain spread
through my front torso that was excruciating. I screamed
in agony while collapsing, letting go of the tiller and
the origin of the tremendous burning sensation that felt
like it was coming from deep inside my body then I
couldn’t breathe anymore. Three times at least
I was trying to inhale air but nothing was reacting within my
chest, while my brain was smelling my own flesh
burning. All i was thinking was, "We’ve
been hit. I’m burning, but that’s
OK people can live even if they are badly burn. I
need to breath. I can’t give up. I
need to breath.”
It would have been so easy then
to just let go instead and no longer suffer the agonizing
burning pain. After the 4th try of breathing, it came back,
the lung muscles were responding again. I then fell
on the plastic bench on my left side, adopting a fetal
position no longer hearing from my right ear - the
side facing the tiller, but it came back later in the ER.
I got lucky this time.
Lightening strikes are fatal in 30 to 70% of cases, causing
death by cardiac and/or pulmonary arrest. I only experienced
the second one and only temporally, fortunately.
We are still debating whether the lightening made contact
with the mast and thus got to Louise and me via the metal
connections within the boat which probably diffused some of
the magnitude within the mast and the rigging or the
main contact was with water instead. The mast standing up so
high is the most likely hypothesis. There is a type of lightening
which is called staccato lightening. Maybe this is what hit
us. It is a very short lightening from clouds to ground and
has considerable branching and maybe that minimized the amount
of the electric discharge we got on boat. Louise and I
were staying behind the mast and Louise now recalls seeing
a lightening bolt in front of her, with an angle to the mast.
Both
Louise and I got taken to the ER at Mass General Hospital.
They ruled out any serious damages to vital organs. Everybody
there admired the “fern” patterns on my torso where
the electrons entered my body. I was told it’s apparently
very rare to observe such patterns on live survivors of lightening.I
found a very striking one (no pun intended) on the Internet (mine
is not as big I think) but it will give you an idea: http://205.243.100.155/frames/human_LF2.jpg