[C320-list] Electrical storm on c320

[Christopher Nichols]

Hi, 
Many thanks for all the thoughts on this topic last month. Just had a most dramatic practical experience en route Nantucket to Oak Bluffs. 

6 miles out of port in fair weather with 10 knots of breeze from the SW. We noticed a couple of flashes on the horizon to the north and assumed (wrongly) this was sun reflecting on windows of a powercriser we saw in that direction. Half an hour later the northern sky became a bruised blue color just above the horizon. We had just made a turn to the west and started to see the ground strikes to the north. 
Turned on the radar and saw the oblong east to west cloud about 6 miles out. 
Tracked it's movement and turned to NE expecting it to pass towards the SW.
In fact it quickly formed a crescent astern that rapidly looped eastwards and closed the gap we were heading for. 
We were now slap bang the eye of the storm and the wind and torrential downpour hit from the NW rising to 45 knots in about 2 minutes.

Literally the cloud was 8 miles diameter with us at the center. 

We just motored into wind at what would have been 6.2 knots but was only 2 over the ground in practice. 
We exited the NW edge of the storm after about 45 minutes.
At it's worst we had ground strikes on all sides and cloud to cloud directly over us. We were not touched, thank god. 

Sky cleared, beer was consumed. Got to Oak Bluffs about 2 hours ago.

What did I learn?

In reflection we prolonged our exposure by trying to go for the clear sky to the SW, had we motored instead on our original course then we would only have been exposed for a few minutes - that would however have meant motoring towards the area of greatest electrical intensity - perhaps not so good. 

I'm hitting the books on storm formation and tracking. 

Stay insulated!

Chris Nichols