I was another member of the "canoe club"
The carrier I was on, used the 120 V ungrounded delta to power up 120 V convience outlets and lighting. The delta requirement meant we could lose a single phase and still be able to power up 56% of the load. The ungrounded requirement meant that we could have one phase to ground fault and the system would still function. Both of these requirements were used to make the system fault tolerant.
We were repeatedly warned that just because the system was not referenced to ground, that is was _NOT_ safe to touch the energized phases. There was more than enough leakage current between each phase and ground to kill a person.
LarryC
editted to add missing word
[This message has been edited by LarryC (edited 06-09-2006).]
