I am looking at a junk rigged
boat design and I've never owned one before - all my sailing has been
Bermuda rigs: Making the vessel stayed is not really an option.
I currently live in South East
Asia and we have a very significant thunderstorm problem - both frequent and extremely violent: In
Cambodia (my base), there are several hundred deaths every year from
lightning strikes (including one death in the city near my house, a man sitting under his metal-roofed veranda). So we have good reason to respect thunderstorms.
On a stayed
mast, it is possible to bolt chain to the beam stays and take any strike over the side into the
water. Nav
electronics might get fried but at least, the charge is unlikely to travel down the
mast cables and out through the
hull via the
depth gauge (which has happened, blowing a sizable hole in the
hull and sinking the unmanned anchored boat).
But an un-stayed
junk rig mast is stepped into the
keel, with any nav-light
cables and masthead
electronics fed out at
deck or below
deck levels.
So my question is how do you earth a un-stayed mast. For me it's a real issue ... be it at
anchor or underway, a 30' metal mast poking sky-ways in an otherwise flat sea presents a when not if likelihood of getting hit.
Rhoel