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Posts: 1291
Location: Hayward, Wisconsin | http://www.dunnconnect.com/articles/2007/06/20/news/news03.txt
Jun 20, 2007
‘Shocking’ experience - Close call teaches fishermen about who’s really in charge
By LeAnn R. Ralph, Reporter
TAINTER LAKE — Michael Olson thinks a guardian angel (or maybe even two or three) must have been in the boat with them one day last month.
Along with his uncle and sons, he was on a week-long fishing trip in Ontario. Around mid-afternoon on the third day of their fishing trip, with Olson, his uncle and son, Mark, in one boat and the other three boys in another, a thunderstorm began to gather on the horizon.
“The three boys in the other boat went opposite of the direction the storm was headed. We were 10 miles from our cabin. We decided to go back,” Olson recalled.
When he and his companions were four miles from their cabin on the 40-mile long lake, a sudden explosion left them all deaf and speechless.
Actually, they were speechless for maybe 30 seconds to a minute — and deaf, to a greater or lesser degree, for varying amounts of time after that.
“I’ve been in the military. It was like a bomb going off,” Olson said.
“I noticed the noise. I saw a flash of light,” said Mark Lund, Olson’s son and a legislative aide to Rep. Brent Hassert of Illinois.
Olson added, “We were all stunned. My first thought was that the engine had blown up, or maybe one of the gas cans.”
Dazed
After the explosion, the three men sat in the boat looking at each other, trying to figure out what had happened.
“We were dazed. We were checking with each other to make sure everyone was all right,” Lund said.
“The first thing I realized is that we were all talking, but we weren’t saying anything. I could see my son’s mouth moving and my uncle’s mouth moving. But we couldn’t hear each other. We were deaf,” Olson said.
“I wanted to make sure no one was injured. I’m a combat medic,” said Lund, who is in the Army National Guard.
It was right about then that the occupants of the boat realized they had been struck by lightning.
Or more precisely, that the fishing rod which had been only two feet from Olson’s head and had been leaning up against the side of the boat next to him, had been struck by lightning.
Seeking shelter
Luckily, when the lightning struck, they were not far from shore.
Olson headed for land as fast as the boat would go.
“When we got to shore, we all bailed out. It was like Normandy,” Lund said.
“We rode the storm out in the woods. We waited in the rain for 30 minutes to make sure it had stopped storming before we went back to the boat,” Olson said. “I kept apologizing to my uncle and my son. As captain of the boat, I should have got us onto land sooner.”
“We thought we were well ahead of it. We thought we’d get back in plenty of time. We were probably running 25 to 30 miles per hour,” Lund said.
“We all knew we shouldn’t be on the water in a thunderstorm. We thought it was farther away than what it was,” Olson said.
And that, of course — as Olson is now well aware — is the problem with thunderstorms. The position of the clouds on the horizon is not an accurate predictor of how far away the storm might actually be.
“The message is, if you think you’re far enough away from the storm, you’re probably not,” Olson said.
Injuries
Although Olson and his uncle and son were not seriously injured, the vision in Olson’s right eye remained blurry for a while, prompting him to seek medical attention after they returned from the fishing trip.
Each of the three men suffered some hearing loss as well, lasting for several days or more. Two weeks after the incident, Lund went to the doctor to have his ear checked out because his hearing was still affected.
“I had my ear looked at, but there’s no permanent damage,” he reported.
Half a fishing rod
The only thing that did suffer permanent damage from the lightning strike was Olson’s fishing rod.
Half of the rod disappeared, and what remains is handful of black fiber filaments that used to be part of the upper half of the rod.
Surprisingly enough, the reel was not damaged at all.
“It’s my favorite reel, too,” Olson said. “I’m going to mount it on the wall as a reminder. And I’m going to leave my favorite reel on there as a reminder.”
Otherwise, the boat sustained remarkably little damage. In fact, the only thing knocked out was the depth finder mounted on the steering column.
“We were surprised at the lack of damage. We thought we’d see some black streaks, or maybe that it had blown a hole in the boat,” Olson said.
But there are no black streaks and no holes.
On the gunwale of the boat, however, are some tiny pits in the aluminum and a few bits that look like welding splash spots.
The landing net also has two small holes, one on each side of the handle.
“We don’t know which is the entry hole and which is the exit hole, but one is an entry hole and one is an exit hole,” Olson said.
Lucky break
He surmises that after the lightning hit the fishing rod, it traveled through the frame of the landing net, along the gunwale of the boat and then into the water.
“It never actually came in the boat. If it had, we’d all be dead,” Olson said.
In addition to the three men and their fishing gear, the boat contained two car batteries, six gallons of gas and another 2.5 gallons of spare gas.
“If it had hit the gas cans or the car batteries, we’d all be dead, too,” Olson said.
Lund wondered, “Was it a good thing or a bad thing that the rod was sticking up? If it had been (flat) in the bottom of the boat, would the lightning have struck something else in the boat? Or would it not have struck at all? There’s no way to know.”
“We were real popular in the resort. There’s about 20 cabins. Everyone had to come and hear what had happened and to take a look at my fishing rod,” Olson said.
More storms
During the week that Olson and his uncle and his sons were fishing in Ontario, storms rumbled through the area during the afternoons.
“It was dry up there. The lake was down about a foot. But every day between about two o’clock and 3:30 [p.m.], storms would come through,” Olson said.
After the lightning strike, “When we saw clouds developing, we’d go in,” he said.
Olson and his fishing companions were not the only ones who would head in.
“It was almost kind of funny,” Lund said, “because after that, whenever a little cloud would come up in the sky, you’d see all these boats heading into shore.”
Stay safe
Olson lives just north of Jake’s Supper Club. He says he sometimes sees boats headed out on Tainter Lake away from the Lambs Creek Boat Landing when a thunderstorm is approaching and thinks it is not very wise.
“If you can hear (thunder), get off the lake,” he advised.
“The lesson from this is — lightning does hit, and you can’t outrun a storm … I know we’ll be more careful after this,” Lund said.
“We thought we had more than enough distance. We didn’t,” Olson said.
As for the lightning incident on the lake in Ontario, he said he was glad they had all been wearing life jackets.
“If it had hit in the boat, and we were all killed and ended up in the water, at least they would have been able to find our bodies,” Olson concluded.
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| Wow, I hope that never happens to me. My dad's house was struck by lightning just last year. He was not home at the time, but was in Church about 8 blocks away and heard it hit. He had no idea it was his house that was struck until he got home and tried the garage door opener. No use, as the lightning knocked out that, a couple of TVs, and a computer that was about a week old. He bought bigger tvs with the insurance money. I'm sure he was glad to have been gone at the time. I'm glad he was.
Great story Larry, thanks. | |
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Posts: 1080
| Thunderstorms and lightning is nothing to mess around with. No fish is worth your life. Sure...it's been said that the fishing "could" be better as a storm front approaches........but doesn't always mean it is better. Heck...even if it's the best fishing possible in the world..it's not worth risking your life for a fish. Those fish will still be there after the storm passes.
I can relate to this story of this group of people, being that I've been struck by lightning myself and survived with no long lasting ill affects. It was truly the scariest and most terrifying thing I've experienced in my life. I was not struck while out in a boat fishing. I was at summer camp back in my teenage years. All campers were running from their respective cabins to a storm shelter...I was hit just prior to reaching the storm shelter. I was knocked unconscious (so we think I was just unconscious) and thrown into the brick wall of the shelter, left slump and unconscious as the other campers stepped over me to get into the shelter. The counselors picked me up and carried me into the storm shelter. Once inside, they laid me on some sort of a metal bench or table. That metal bench or table was pushed up against the wall where it was touching one of those old, heat radiator units. The storm shelter we were in...was also then hit by lightning and I was then popped again by the lightning traveling through that heat radiator unit and into the table I was lying on and brought back to. Was I unconscious the first time? Or had I been killed by the first strike and brought back to by the second strike? No one, including the doctors that I saw after the storm passed could be able to determine anything. I was temporarily paralyzed, smoking like a piece of bacon, the traditional tie-dye shirt I had made at camp that week was now back to a plain white t-shirt with the exception of the dye that remained around the bottom seam area of the shirt and I had temporary hearing loss as well. I had no entry or exit wound on my body, thankfully.
Lightning is a very strange thing. One thing to keep in mind about lightning: It does not play by ANY single set of rules. Some people die from a strike, some live. Some get burns (exit/entry wounds), some don't. Everyone's experiences and side affects are different. Heck....I've seen lightning during the middle of massive snow storms in the middle of winter. My wife and I witnessed a lightning strike during the middle of the day one time when there was no storm building, no storm clouds to be seen, no rain...nothing. Just a random...lightning bolt, followed by thunder...but nothing that resembled that of a storm anywhere near at that time...at least not in our immediate, visible area.
For years...I couldn't wear a simple, wrist watch after the strike. Within just days...the batteries in the watches I'd try wearing, would be shot. It got to be too much of a p.i.a. to bother with watches anymore...so...I no longer wear them and haven't now for 20 some years.
20 some years later....I'm still just as afraid of thunderstorms and lightning as I have been since that day. When I'm out on the water...if I so much as hear a clap of thunder or a storm cloud or a flash of lightning, you'll see me move like lightning to get in and off the water asap, no messing around, to get in to shelter. It scares me still while I'm in inside, out of the storm. Scares me when I'm out driving a car in a storm.
Bottom line: No fish is worth it. Live another day to catch another fish. Use some common sense.
Edited by MACK 6/25/2007 8:39 AM
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Posts: 785
| Wow, I guess I'm going to have to be a little less stuburn when a storm is approaching. That could end your fishing season real quick, and your life! | |
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Be safe out there! A word to the Wise.