Safe!
29 September 2013 | Port Townsend, Boat Haven yard
Eric

There was a fire on a boat in the Port Townsend yard last Friday; it wasn’t our boat, we’re safe, and Rover (our boat) is fine. It was too damn close.
Linda and I were inside Rover, doing some paperwork about 9 am. I smelled something hot and went to the cockpit to investigate. A cloud of white smoke was coming from a boat in the adjacent row, one over from the one kitty-corner to ours. We were downwind, and the smoke was thick and increasing. I told Linda there was a fire, and to quickly grab her stuff and leave. She got out, and I grabbed my wallet, cellphone and car keys and shut down all the power in our boat. After double checking the switches, I went on deck, and Linda was asking me to hurry up. It had only been about a minute, and already the smoke was much thicker and black. We got in the car and drove it about 50 yards away, to PT Rigging. From our angle, the boat on fire was beyond Rover, and the flames were visible, probably 20 feet above our boat. Sirens of approaching fire trucks were audible above the crackling of the flames, and people were coming out of the businesses and boats around the yard. The fire was well established, so there was nothing to be done but wait for the fire department and see how much the fire spread.
We’d heard about marina fires that had spread from boat to boat, and taken out whole rows. There’s lots of flammable stuff in boats, including propane tanks, fuel, etc. Fiberglass will burn, and Port Townsend is a center for wooden boats. At the dockyard flammable chemicals are used.
The fire was continuing to grow, so we went inside the PT Rigging building, to their second story window, to watch from there. Someone asked if I wanted to borrow a camera to take some pictures, and I thought of Darth Vader: “Just for once...let me look on you with my own eyes” and turned down the offer.
Just then, the flames visibly shrank down. The fire department was knocking them down. We went back outside, and got close enough to see that there wasn’t any damage to Rover.
The boat that burned was the “Treasure Hunter”; a 50’ 1942 ex-USN pilot boat with a wooden hull and steel superstructure. The three boats immediately adjacent to the “Treasure Hunter” were damaged to various degrees. The “Sea Gypsy” was in our row, two over from Rover. She’s a ~60’ wooden ketch, and was directly downwind. Her bow was burned. Scuttlebutt in the yard is that she was uninsured, and that the heat likely damaged the frame enough that she will be a total loss. An aluminum hulled ~70’ ketch adjacent to the “Treasure Hunter” had the paint burned off one side. The “Alma A”, a ~40’ wooden fishing boat suffered minor damage. The “Del Norte”, adjacent to Rover and kitty-corner to the fire also suffered damage. Each of these boats is what Linda and I call a “Dream boat”. They’re long-term projects, sustained by sweat equity and the dreams of their owners. It’s a race against the tendency toward decay, and they’re huge projects, perhaps bigger than the available time and resources of the owners to win the race.
Rover was downwind from the fire, so there were a lot of ashes on the top of our boat. I thanked the Firechief for saving our boat, and asked if we could use a hose to wash off the boat. He said he’d have some of “his boys” take care of it for us. They climbed up and hosed her off with a fire hose. That helped a lot, then we spent some more time swabbing the deck. About the time we finished, we noticed that ashes were continuing to blow from the charred wreckage of the “Treasure Hunter”. We’ll probably be dealing with the ashes of the “Treasure Hunter” dream until the rain turns steady, and we leave the yard.
The picture is the view from our bow toward the “Treasure Hunter”, still smoldering.
Here’s a link to an article:
http://www.ptleader.com/news/update---no-insurance-on--foot-wooden-boat/article_98073ddc-2799-11e3-ae4a-0019bb30f31a.html?mode=story