We were on a starboard tack and about 4 boat lengths ahead of the second place boat when the radio blasted. I had noticed the very dark clouds that had begun to roll in about halfway through the race, but now as we were nearing the finish, the race committee had suddenly canceled the race due to weather. The captain told us that we were going to come about so that we could drop the sails and motor in quickly… actually, very quickly.
The seas started to get rough, the wind picked up and the sky turned black, except for the flashes of lightning. The captain told all 10 of us crew members that we were in a bad spot. Even though we were close to land and only 30 minutes from the dock, the lightning was going to get worse. He instructed us to stay away from the mast, boom and anything else metal on the boat. So we all stood on the deck trying to keep our balance without holding on to anything. Usually the ride back into the dock involves laughing, storytelling and drinking beer, but on this ride back in, there was uncomfortable silence.
We heard a loud popping noise behind us and we saw that a sailboat, several boats behind us had decided to sail, (rather than motor), back into the dock. The high winds had burst the sails and they were now flapping like streamers in the wind. Since another boat came to their rescue, we continued toward the dock. As we approached the dock, the captain told us that we would tie down quickly and then we should run to the lightning proof gazebo at the end of the dock.
So we pulled our boat in at full speed, we quickly tied the boat down and ran as fast as we could to the gazebo. Just as the last of the crew reached the gazebo, there was a huge flash of light and an explosion that rocked us all. The sailboat next to ours was hit by a lightning blast, and the top of their mast was reduced to splinters of aluminum scattered about the boat and the dock.
We rode out the remainder of the storm in the gazebo and within 45 minutes the sky was blue and the seas were calm. Although our boat was not hit by the lightning, there was enough electricity in the water to destroy all our electronics. We did not sail for the next two weeks while the boat was being repaired.
This event happened to me several years ago when I was sailing quite a bit. You never know when a disaster will happen; it can be sunny one minute and crazy the next. Two weeks without a competitive recreational boat is an inconvenience, but what if a lightning storm like this were to hit your business? Shortly, after this event, I asked our staff to prioritize our disaster recovery processes. Yes, we had disaster recovery (DR), but we needed to have a constant upgrade process. DR is one of these things that you put in place and it can be easy to forget. With a constant upgrade process, you are always looking at the newest technological advancements and improvements in disaster recovery.
At B2BGateway, we have put a lot of thought into our DR plan. Our Boston and Rhode Island offices are intentionally in an area free of earthquakes, free of tornados and free of biblical type plagues. However we are on the outer edge of the US Hurricane zone and we are not immune to snow and ice storms. As such, on staff we have some very pessimistic IT disaster specialists who do their best, by always thinking the worst. Although it must be an exhausting job, thanks to the DR specialists, we have redundant physical locations, redundant internet connections, redundant and standalone power sources and multiple failover capabilities to physical as well as SAS-70/SSAE-16 cloud based processing. Over the last few years our non-maintenance related uptimes percentage have been around 99.96%.
Well, I hope that you, your boat or your business is never hit by lightning and that your “ride back to the dock” will always involve laughing, storytelling and drinking beer.
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