If you have been following us us on our travels, you know that a few weeks ago we had an aborted delivery when the boat got hit by lightning. Well…

That boat–and its new owner–are now here in the Chesapeake, just a dozen miles from our anchorage in Deltaville. It had been patched up well enough for a delivery crew to motor it north. We traveled over to the tiny, remote, but picturesque, town of Urbanna, Virginia (Pop. 500) to meet up with the owner and do some training on the “new to her” boat, and help with some lingering electrical issues from the lightning strike. How small is Urbanna? So small my cell phone doesn’t work here. So small only one street has ever been been visited by Google Street View cars, and that was 8 years ago…

Profitable a long time ago from the seafood processing industry, it is now a remote, wealthy suburb of Richmond. about an hour’s drive away. Still with a lot of charm.

Back to the Little Things…

One of the lessons this lightning strike has reenforced is do not assume you have found all the problems for a very long time. Sometimes things were damaged, and fail later, sometimes you get tricked into thinking something works, when it does not. An example: Right after the lighting strike we used the electric furler to roll up the mainsail. We made the assumption that the furler was fine. EXCEPT… the delivery crew discovered that while it rolled the sail IN just fine, it could not roll the sail back OUT. Assuming the likely fault was the switch, I took that apart, and found everything fine. Opening the contol box revealed a fairly simple system of a single large relay. I pulled out the relay, and as we were cycling through the various switches, I felt a wire under my finger suddenly get quite hot. Abnormally so.

The offending piece, and its issue were quickly apparent.

Connected across each of the two coils in the relay was a “flyback diode”. These are installed to prevent the large reverse voltage that can be generated when power is interrupted in a coil from damaging attached equipment. In this case one of the two had been blown out by the lightning strike, causing to to conduct current both ways, short circuiting the control system, and disabling the coil.

Fortunately, I had a bunch of these left over from the bow thruster lift project. Total cost of parts to repair: 15 Cents.