Graphite fishing rods can be excellent conductors of electricity, which is not good news for those who fish with them.
Every so often you hear about someone trout fishing with a fly rod and being electrocuted by a lightning strike. In fact it has happened several times on the San Juan River just below Navajo Dam .
Once I was fishing with Dave “Bob” Granger from Farmington, New Mexico. Bob and I were both bass fishing with fly rods and we were catching a ton of Smallmouth Bass on black and brown wooly booger trout flies that imitate caterpillars. We had pulled my Tracker Bass boat up on the bank around the corner from a long point that extended out into the lake up in St. Francis canyon on Navajo Lake, and I noticed a pretty dark thunderhead approaching from over the canyon wall.
There hadn’t been any thunder so I wasn’t really concerned about lightning as yet. I was casting to a pile of submerged boulders off the end of the point and was catching bass on almost every cast.
The sky continued to get darker and Dave “Bob” and I had discussed that if it started to rain we would high tail it a little way up the bank to a shallow cave we saw earlier, and take shelter until the rain passed.
After I made another cast to my “honey hole” boulder pile at the end of the point, I reached up to grasp the fly line for the first strip to tease another smallmouth into biting. When my hand reached a distance of about ½” from my fly rod, the hair on my arm stood up and a blue arc of static electricity zapped from my finger to the rod. Needless to say, I was amazed! Stupidly amazed. Standing in water up to my knees, looking up at the tip of my nine and a half foot graphite fly rod, it dawned on me. I dropped the rod into the lake and took two steps toward the cave shelter shouting to Dave “Bob” to do the same when a massive lightning bolt struck a tree not fifty feet from where we were standing.
As we hunkered down watching the lightning strike all around us, we talked about just how lucky we were not to be cooked by that first bolt. Twenty minutes later the rain and lightning stopped and we continued to catch dozens of fish for the rest of the day.
When I returned home to Albuquerque the next day, I mentioned the incident to my neighbor. He informed me that it takes almost 50,000 volts of electricity to arc ½”, and that I should count my blessings to be alive.
So when you’re fishing and it begins to look like a storm might be brewing, take a tip from the PGA, consider the lake closed, and take shelter.
By the way, Dave was nicknamed “Bob” by his brother because he had a habit of falling into the San Juan River almost every time they went fishing.