Family STRUCK BY LIGHTNING on 58 foot catamaran, while underway!

There are a handful of things that every sailor fears. A fire onboard is probably the worst case scenario, followed by sinking, then man overboard and not being able to retrieve him or her. And lightning... which can cause all three of those to happen simultaneously. We have heard stories of sailors going 30-40-50 miles out of their way to avoid lightning. And we now see why. One of the worst possible scenarios happened to us when we were least expecting it. We were struck by lightning, on the open ocean, while underway, and of course, it was dark. We met an awesome group of boat friends in Georgetown. Brent actually met them in Staniel, while I was in West Virginia with my mom. We met back up in Georgetown and had a whole lotta fun! From a full beach day, to the guys playing on the efoils, to dinner, to a dance party, we had all the fun sailors could possibly have! We were really sad to have to leave our new friends, but our transmission went out and we were down to one engine. We needed to have it diagnosed and repaired. Plus we are late in the season and we are trying to make Grenada before hurricanes start rolling though the Caribbean. Little did we know, we were already too late. It was a beautiful sail. I did not know the ocean could be so calm and so flat. There was not much wind, so we were motoring sailing, and just really enjoying this passage! It was kind of reinforcing that we did the right thing and this was one hundred percent the right choice for our family. And then. All of the sudden....chaos. There was a small squall. And then three. And they all converged, right on top of us. It happened so fast, there was no going around it. Everyone on board was okay. Shaken, but okay. Sea Dog was still floating. Needless to say, this was one of the scariest situations we had ever been in. And we learned some serious lessons about this lifestyle. We will talk about that a little more in the next episode. This all happened almost one year ago, to the day. We were struck on May 24th, 2023. Today, the day of uploading, is May 17th, 2024. One week shy of our one year lightning anniversary. Stay tuned to see what this means for our family in the coming months...