Everyone asks what it was like.
It was loud and pink. That's it.
It happens so fast that the strike itself isn't really the thing. The crack. The freeze. The blank screens where your instruments used to be. That's it. You're not dead. You don't scream. You just stop — completely — for about two seconds, and then your brain catches up and you start checking fuses.
July 1st, 2025. Spa Creek, Annapolis. Day 1,000.
I'd been watching the squall come in. Not nasty wind, just a lot of lightning. I was below deck — generator on, AC running — thinking about the date I had planned for that evening. I decided to go up the companionway to take one more look at the sky.
That's when it happened.
The crack of a whip — not thunder, which is what most people imagine. Loud and sharp and immediate, right there in the companionway, with a flash of big pink light. A complete freeze — not a jump, not a scream, just a full-body stop. Then silence.
I looked at the inverter. Blank screen.
I looked at the instrument panel. Dark.
Fuck. What was that?
I went through the fuses. Hit every breaker. Nothing. Anything that had been on in the panel was fried. Two small fuses completely shot. Everything else intact, but everything else dead.
I checked the bilge. Started researching.
Seemed I'd be stuck in Annapolis for a while.
There's a small device at the top of the mast called a static dissipater — it looks like a fuzzy little brush, easy to miss. I'll get into what that thing did and didn't do in another post. But I believe it's the reason I'm here writing this. And I believe it's the reason Lost and Found is still in the water.
The photo exists because of an Airbnb.
When I came back down to Annapolis a few weeks later — she'd been hauled out, up on the hard, getting the maritime equivalent of a very thorough physical, the kind men our age have to start getting in their 40s — I booked a room through Airbnb. The listing mentioned the host was a sailor. So when she asked why I was in town, I told her the story.
She went quiet. Then: Wait. Are you the one who got hit in Spa Creek?
There was a photo circulating around the Annapolis sailing community. Someone had captured the bolt hitting the water that afternoon — the masts of a dozen boats lit up underneath it, the bolt reflected in the creek below. It had been going around among sailors who knew the harbor, people trying to figure out whose boat had taken the strike. She pulled up her phone and showed me.
One of those boats — the one it actually hit — was mine.
I was looking at a photograph of the exact moment. Taken by a stranger. Shared among strangers. Found by an Airbnb host who happened to sail.
I don't believe in coincidences anymore. I believe in a higher power at work.
And here's what I keep thinking about: this happened on Day 1,000. One thousand days sober. Almost to the hour. If you believe in that kind of thing — and I do — the universe has a sense of timing.
The initial damage estimate came in at seventy thousand dollars. A four-week delay, minimum, before I could head north to my kids.
I sat with that number. Day 1,002, tagged #humbled.
Here's what I wrote: At least I'm okay. Could have been a lot worse.
Life gives us good, bad, and ugly. And that shifts. Minute to minute, day by day, week by week, year by year. We can't even average it out. We just need to be okay with it.
I'm not sure I've said anything wiser than that. I was just a guy sitting in Annapolis with a broken boat and a date that got cancelled by the sky.
Ten days later I was on a plane to Nicaragua to meet a woman I'd matched with on Tinder. The boat was on the hard and my boards were under my arm. The insurance claim was open. The repair estimate was sitting on my phone.
Best case: I found a great person. Worst case: I got some great waves.
I went anyway. Because that's what you do.
(The final number, once I got back in the water in the fall and discovered what the strike had done to the engine — came to a hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars. Nearly the total value of the boat. But that's a story for another day.)
Here's the thing about getting struck by lightning when you're just past a thousand days sober, alone on a boat, trying to sail north to rebuild a relationship with your kids:
It stops you. It makes you ask whether you're moving in the right direction at the right speed. It costs you time and money you don't have. It makes you lonelier than you already were.
And then — slowly, through the insurance claims and the repair estimates and the months waiting on the hard — it also gives you something. A story. A photo you couldn't have staged. A reason to stay still long enough to hear what you needed to hear. To find the things you needed to find. To meet the people you needed to meet.
The boat wasn't ready to go north. Neither was I.
We both needed the work.
She's in the water now. I'm sailing up the Potomac on my shakedown. We're finally moving.
Eleven months late. Right on time.