Just in case you thought our life was all sunbathing and snorkeling we had an incident today which illustrates it is not all plain sailing!.  We woke up to a heavy threatening grey sky, not at all unusual at this time of year during the wet season when squalls and thunderstorms are regular events.  As we were sipping our morning tea we could hear the rumble of thunder moving closer and it started to rain,...brutal, torrential biblical rain and we soon found ourselves far too close for comfort to the middle of a spectacular lightning show.  At this point there is not a great deal one can do except put a handheld GPS, VHF and the Sat phone into the oven (not as daft as it seems for any of you who can remember the principle of a Faraday cage) and then make sure you are not sitting, standing, or holding on to anything metal.  After that it is just a case of hoping for the best, clearly an advanced and scientific technique for dealing with one of nature's unpredictable and elemental forces.  Lucy takes this approach one step further and finds that putting a pillow over her head helps! 

 

It is never a good thing if the flash and the bang of lightning occur at exactly the same time and it is even worse when you hear the crackle in the air before the event which is exactly what happened to us this morning.  The generator, that had been running, stopped (I'm still not quite sure how or why) and I remember saying to Lucy "Goodness!.... that WAS close!!!" and wondering exactly how close it had been.  A few minutes later we realised that our poor neighbours, Steve and Connie on "Better Days" anchored less than 100 feet from us had actually received the full power of the strike.  Fortunately they were both fine but the lightning has done a huge amount of damage to their boat's systems leaving them with hardly any electrics, no navigational equipment even wiping out things like the generator and the alternator on the main engine.  The top of the mast that started the day bristling with antennas is now strangely bare with everything vaporized by the power of the strike.  It will be a long and expensive job to get everything back up and running and will involve them leaving the San Blas and travelling along the coast to Colon to find the parts and maybe some professional help.

 

Although we were very very lucky we do not seem to have got away entirely free from the effects of the blast.  I think we were probably still close enough to suffer some kind of side-strike and we have lost the use of our wind instruments and of the remote handset for our fixed VHF radio (which is really odd as the main system it plugs into is still working).  I have spent the day running through all the systems to check that everything else is still working and now we just have to hope that there is nothing more serious that has yet to surface.  One has to remember that the good news is that nobody was hurt and that Better Days does not seem to have suffered any irreparable damage but it has knocked a big whole in their cruising plans and will put a dent in their budget.    

 

The other good news is that it is now clearing up and so we are off to the beach for a birthday party.  There will certainly be cake but I'm not sure this is actually going to be a "tea" party!