Re: Fiberglass vs aluminum in a thunderstorm
I agree with Bondo's response the most. While it's true the antennae do attract lightning strikes, overall your chances of getting hit by lightning increase in a tin boat. On the other hand, your chances of surviving a hit are also better in a tin boat. <br />Two fundamentals about lightning that are good to remember when trying to understand it:<br />1.It is not a bullet fired from the sky with intertia that make slight course changes while it travels; the path it travels is somewhat planned out before the strike actually occurrs.<br />2. Air is as much an insulator or deterrent of lightning as a fiberglass boat or many other insulators for that matter. The phrase or idea that a bit of glass or rubber is not going to stop a lightning bolt is somehwhat misleading - it kind of suggests that lightning does have intertia or travels from point A to B carving a path along the way. This is not the case. Media undergoes a physical change in properties to accomodate the passing of electricity. Sometimes a hole is blown clear through it from the heat and other times the media is ionized so as to conduct electrity. Either way, the lightning requires extra energy in order to accomplish travelling through an insulator. If you think of how much voltage is required for electricity to arc say an inch or so (from a finger to a doorknob or even from one side of a recepticle to the other - I think 3 feet requires something like 30,000 volts), you can appreciate just how much energy you are saving a lightning bolt by offering it a conductive path through say an antennae over air.<br />Make sure you are lower than the highest conductive point but also be careful that you do not attract lightning more than necessary by offering a conductive path. You also must be careful that any materials around you are capable of taking the full load of a strike and that you will not share in it. <br />Hypothetical: If you are in a glass boat in a storm with no shelter is it better to stand a large graphite fishing pole at the front of the boat to attract the lighting away from you but at the same time increasing the chances of the boat getting hit or to just lie in the boat an do nothing? What if it is a metal boat?<br />Answer = I don't know. <br />But I do have a homeade lightning rod for my aluminum boat that I use when I am sleeping onboard and a storm wakes me in the middle of the night. I am confident that using it is benefitial as I asked a professor at the University of Florida (world reknown prof on lightning) on the precautions I should take and how to construct the lightning rod.<br />'Course, best policy is to stay off the water.
<br /><br />If you didn't have a lightning rod set up, you'd probably be safer in the aluminum boat. Where the arc goes through the fiberglass, a large hole will be blown (ie, the bottom). The aluminum boat has a good chance of surviving the hit without major heating/melting. I think this is an issue with the use of composite materials in airplanes, since airplanes get hit pretty often.
