A True and Particular Account of Captain John Mallette's Encounters with Lightning at Sea

North Carolina has a long history of sea narratives: chapbooks that chronicled brave captains, daring crews, and the adventures and mishaps that befell them on the open water. In this episode of Storm Stories, we continue that tradition by talking with Captain John Mallete about one of his most harrowing experiences: sailing through the 2003 storm where he was suddenly struck by lightning.

Transcript

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My name is John Millett. I am a lifelong commercial fisherman, quarter boat captain, private sport fish boat captain. Uh co-own Southern Breeze Seafood in Smeeds Ferry, North Carolina. And I am also a seafood ambassador for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. I'm sure you're familiar with Ocean City, right? So I was born in Wilmington, uh, grew up in Wilmington, but my family had a beach house in Ocean City. And my father was one of the original investors and developers with the chestnuts and the greens and all of them in Ocean City. And I was always drawn to the water. You can't keep me out of that ocean. Surf City, there's a place called One Stop Baking Tackle. The owners were Betty and Preston Warren. Betty Warren was a retired school teacher, ran that little seafood market. And her husband Preston was a commercial fish breath trapper. She would babysit me while my mom worked and stuff like that. And first at the shop as a little kid, taught me how to hit strap and filet flounder and things like that. And uh husband Preston was dead at seven, eight years old. That's where I fell in love with, and that's how I got started, and and I just became like a docret and just kind of would work working hooks that would let me work with them and and learn from them. And I just started young and started doing it. Running people's boats and eventually I got my master's, got my license at 18, and it never stopped. There's been a lot of bad storms, and to be honest, a lot of people think storms are where the main danger happens. The the danger is usually on the days where it's not a storm, where it's sunny and oceans calm and everything because during storms you're on your P's and Q's, you're double, triple, quadruple chick and everything, and you're usually safer it's those calm bluebird days when you let your guard down, that's where bad stuff generally tends to happen. I can tell you a story on a private boat job that sticks out vividly. I was running a a sport fishing yacht back from the Bahamas and we were coming through in Lake Worth Inlet in Florida, Palm Beach. We were probably 10 miles from Lake Worth Inlet, running about 30 knots. We had gone through a hard storm. It's like when the storm is over, we're just sprinkling, but it's still overcast, still cloudy and everything, and there was thunder like when it was like slow motion. It's like right to my left side, to the port side of the boat by the bow. Lightning struck the water. I guess it's found from the water was super close to transferred to the boat. I'm holding the wheel of the boat, and I saw the lightning hit the water fighter out, and then everything went black. We got struck by lightning. You could Google the type of boat that I was on. It was a 61-foot Jarrett-based orkfish. So you have your helm up top and your cabin under you. Basically, what happened, electricity ran through the boat, and it hit me and actually knocked me out. I came to with my upper torso hanging over the edge of the bridge towards the cockpit. So I was very close to falling and falling on a fighting chair and hurting myself really bad or something like that, but I did. And when I came to, I didn't know what happened. But I literally hit myself. I guess the electricity going through my body did that. And the boat was at its end field, it actually left a lot of power out of the boat. It blows it alone. Just everything on the boat that was electrical was destroyed. I go down to the cabin, check it on the boat, obviously, checking for fire and thing like that, make sure nothing's burning. Uh, blown out the microwave. Everything is fried and uh emergency lights did come off. My mate at the time, he was freaking out. He didn't know what happened because he was asleep. And he saw me and bam. But we got up bearings and uh went a little old school, took some some good old ether, and we were close enough to see land. At first I knew the heading were off because compass still worked, so if you try to win out the land for anyway. Um used some good old ether and we had to get the motors out of electronics and electrical stuff and got the motors running again and uh we couldn't we couldn't get up to a running speed because the electrical was fried, so the gears were in like a limp mode, so we had to basically limp to the dock. We got really lucky for that. That could have been that could have gone a lot of different shades around. And uh, but we made it back to that boat was never right again. Uh the owner filed insurance and spent oh gosh, most of well over a couple hundred grand redoing all the electrical with a boat, completely getting the boat with electrical and but that boat was never right saying it always had these little gremlins, like little electrical gremlins. Just something was always off at the cellar boat. That was a matter of 2003. I'm gonna say that's one thing I don't know. Yeah, you got struck by lightning, that happened. You know what I mean? Lightning never struck right, but I've been on board several boats that's been struck by lightning over the years. You're in the middle of the ocean, you're the only metal thing floating around out there, man. It's all happening. A lot of movies and people like to tell stories of oh, this storm just came out of nowhere. And we got technology now, this storm don't come out of nowhere. The wind might kick up bigger or the current might switch and change, and the wind and the current go different direction might make waves a little bit bigger, but it's really no such thing as just popping up out of nowhere. But if you run across something, what do you do? It's not like you pull over to the side of the road and wait it out. It's hard to give advice, just always be prepared for. I know it sounds cliche to say expect unexpected, but that's what it is. Don't expect anything, but be prepared for anything. You never know. No one rules come home every day. Don't become complacent. That's what gets everybody is respect this around this. Never say, ah, today this won't happen, or oh, I won't worry about it today. If you got usual safety measures you take, or you might be like, ah, you know what? My battery on my EPER, my signal device or something like that's how we said I'll do it next week. Yeah, don't ever do that. That will bite you mad every single time. If your flares are out of date, get new ones. That stuff is cheap, your life ain't so. I would think if you really investigate most really bad accidents or things that go wrong, a lot of it's what we call LOM, a lack of maintenance, or just complacency. Complacency gets cute. That's my number one advice about anything on the water. Learn more about Dorsides at Dorthides.org.