Tournament First

[Prairiefire]

So we were fishing a tournament yesterday out in the rain with some minor lightning cracking around us. I fire out a cast with my spinning rod spooled with 8 pound mono and instead of falling to the water the line lifts up in the air levitating up above the water. It kept continuing to rise up as long as I held my rod up. One of the other guys in the tournament said he experienced the same thing and he actually fed line off the spool and it just kept peeling off and up into the air. It was a pretty spooky sight. Has anyone else ever seen this happen?

[CAMAN]

Sorry but there is no such thing as "minor lightning" when you're in the middle of a lake with a lightning rod in your hands. Especially when the electricity in the air is so strong it lifts your line into the air. The most important sign of getting off the water is lightning or thunder, another is just as you described with the line floating in the air.

[DTro]

[Superduty]

So we were fishing a tournament yesterday out in the rain with some minor lightning cracking around us. I fire out a cast with my spinning rod spooled with 8 pound mono and instead of falling to the water the line lifts up in the air levitating up above the water. It kept continuing to rise up as long as I held my rod up. One of the other guys in the tournament said he experienced the same thing and he actually fed line off the spool and it just kept peeling off and up into the air. It was a pretty spooky sight. Has anyone else ever seen this happen?

I've seen this twice in my life. Time to put the rods down...

[paceman]

I have never experienced it, nor do I want to...

[NETim]

Even if lightning doesn't kill you, it usually screws a guy up pretty badly.

No fish is worth that.

[RK]

Good God man...

I've seen it once too, on Lake of the Woods muskie fishing. Dacron line was floating 3' off the water waving and rippling. Lifted my rod tip and it crackled. Yelled at the guys I was with to reel the hell in, and drove the boat up onto the island we were fishing at about 20 mph. 15 seconds later lightning was blasting the trees around us.

I know one person who was hit by lightning and lived, and I saw what he went through. The current passed through the minerals in his bones and basically burned him from the inside out, down his arm and into his torso. Even weeks later he'd have muscle spasms that were so painful he'd curl up in a ball and forget to breathe and pass out. I also know two people whose friend was hit by lighting while they were in the boat together. He was sitting between them and got hit right in the back of the head....it more or less took his head off. I know what they went through too.

Minor lighting is like "a little bit pregnant" and "mostly dead." When I see lighting I'm gone, and most smart phones now have apps that will notify you of nearby lightning strikes. No fish is worth it.

[TonkaBass]

Had this happen once during practice. Yup, back to the ramp to wait it out...

[blakjack23]

I haven't seen line lift up, but I've been out a couple times when I've lifted my rod tip and heard it start 'buzzing'. Pretty crazy.

[thatoneguy]

I've (thankfully) never had it happen on the water, but years ago while warming up for a Legion baseball game in (IIRC) Brainerd on a muggy summer day with lightning in the distance, I took my cap off to mop my brow and our catcher just pointed and stared at me.

Turns out my hair was all standing straight up with all the electricity in the air. I ran my fingers through my hair and could feel it crackle. Very scary. We all hit the dugout pretty quickly.

[mwal]

Consider yourself lucky to be alive. Your fishing line was sending an ion trail or what they call an upward streamer. You were on the short list for the next lightning strike. IF your hair ever stands up , your fishing line levitates, Fishing rod crackles. you had better be moving as fast as you can to a safe place. My cousin was hit by lighting while caddying 2 cardiologists in a golf tourney when he was a college student. They all experienced their hair raising. My cousin went to grab the pin from the hole and he woke up days later in the hospital. If he wasn't with 2 experts in CPR he would of been dead. There was no lighting except for the bolt that hit him. Consider your self lucky. No fish is worth it.

Mwal

[Nick Kuhn]

While being 8 feet off the surface of the water does make you a more likely target to be struck by lightning, it doesn't insure that you are the only target. See pic below, where the circle makes contact with the ground, be it human or the water, is the path lightning will choose. Water is actually often the shortest path:

But still, in a thunderstorm you do have a non-zero chance of being hit by lightning, which means you should still seek a safe structure where you can drop that chance back down to zero.

[bemidjibasser]

It's happened to me more than once, and the buzzing rod tip is a little unnerving as well...

I got zapped a little last year as I was pulling a wad of leaves out of a gutter that was plugged during a storm...felt a lot like a shock from a bare spark plug wire...not a lot of fun to be sure.