Once lightning has found your boat the metal boat provides a very good conductor for the lightning's current to go to ground whereas the non alloy boat does not. the strike on a glass boat may well run through the boats electrical system which, unfortunately, runs back towards the operator (you!). Not surprisingly, the majority of strikes are on sailboats (4 per 1000), but power boats get struck also (5 per 10,000); trawlers have the highest rate for power boats (2 per 1000) and lightning has struck houseboats, bass boats, and even pwcs. one surprise: multihull sailboats are struck more than twice as often as monohulls.. 218 lightning by northwest boats "the cadillac of aluminum boats" comes w/200hp yamaha w/hydraulic steering welded storage trays in hard top cabin.
Not surprisingly, boats get struck where there is a high density of lightning and a high density of boats. the frequency of the boatus lightning claims by state fairly closely resembles the incidence of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.. The strike to the boat (more like up from the boat to meet a strike coming down from cloud) still has to ground through the water, so what's happening is the several vertical feet of boat aluminum is replacing those feet of air. prior to the plasma path being established, the electrical conductivity of air is near zero, so the lightning strike. It is not so much as the boat material which is the risk of being hit but rather what is in the boat that attracts the lightning. long graphite fishing poles set on a down rigger that is down 50 feet under water attracts lightning a heck of a lot faster than someone in an aluminum boat motoring toward shore..
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