Lightning kills angler while fishing tournament

[WB Staff]

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Photo from Bassmaster/ Mike O'Connor

From CBS:
PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. -- Friends and family members are mourning the death of a West Palm Beach man who was struck by lightning during a fishing tournament last weekend.

People gathered at a funeral home in Royal Palm Beach Wednesday evening to remember a man who died in a freak act of nature.

Ed Singleton, 55, a grandfather and postal worker, died Saturday June 8, during a bass fishing tournament on Lake Okeechobee.

Singleton and another man, Tom Brown, were fishing in a boat about a half-mile from shore. They noticed lightning in the area, decided to stop fishing and started the motor and were leaving the area when their boat was hit by a lightning bolt about 1 p.m. Saturday.

"We got hit. I got knocked out, I vaguely remember a flash, I remember waking up, seeing Ed...flagged somebody down who called 911. I woke up leaning forward, my head was on fire, it felt like it was on fire from the strike," Brown said.

Singleton was rushed to a hospital in Clewiston, but he did not survive.
He will be laid to rest at a veterans' cemetery in Kentucky on Monday.

Larry Payne, another friend of the victim, calls Singleton "an honorable man" and says he was a bass fishing fanatic who fished every weekend if he could.

"It's just not something you can explain. It was just, it was his time," Payne said.