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hird Party” and “Pressando”, the two boats that burned at Sea Harbour Yacht Club – were towed to Deaton’s boat yard late yesterday. There, insurance adjusters can have a final say on what are expected to be totaled boats.

Meanwhile, the fire at Sea Harbour left many people grateful that the fire didn’t spread beyond slips 22 and 23 of “A” dock in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The firefighters who battled the fire and the man who initially called 911 to report the blaze were being hailed for averting an even bigger fire.

Some of those stories follow:

A finger pier separates the Hunter that was destroyed and the adjacent Hinckley that had some damage. The masts of the Hunter, and the Catalina came to rest on the finger pier and the Hinckley. Many who came to see the scene Tuesday had high praise for firefighters who kept the blaze from spreading further.

Sylvan Friedman had been up late, doing some work late Monday night. Sometime after 12:45am he went to his kitchen to make a cup of coffee. That’s when he saw flames through his kitchen window. At first he says his reaction was that it wasn’t a fire, but rather a reflection from the TV screen. He quickly saw that it was in fact two boats across the water at Sea Harbour. He called 911. Then he woke his wife Lynn and waited for the volunteer fire department to arrive.

Sylvan and Lynn Freeman outside their wine and flower shop Tuesday afternoon. It was Sylvan Friedman who first saw the fire while getting a cup of coffee just before 1am and noticing flames through his kitchen window. Many were crediting his 911 call as one of the things that kept the fire from destroying even more boats.

Sue Schneider and her husband live aboard a boat at Sea Harbour and was thankful that Sylvan was awake and looking out the window at that time. If he hadn’t she wonders how much further along the fire would have gotten. She and her husband, Dick, whose boat is on a different dock from the one where the fire happened, were asleep and woke to the sound of what they thought was a gunshot or a car backfiring. They opened their companionway to see the fire. As they called 911, firemen were arriving at Sea Harbour.

Firemen Eric Kindle and Peter Ritchie of the Southeast Pamlico Volunteer Fire Department. They and other firefighters spent more than three hours on the scene and returned in daylight to survey the damage. The marina says it is grateful for the firefighters’ work which kept the flames from spreading to the other 30 boats at the dock.

Bill Michne, who as captain of the First Responders turns out for many fires to provide emergency care to firefighters, says that when he drove up to the marina’s parking lot, the flames were so high and bright that the mast tops of many boats were clearly visible.

When the firefighters arrived, within 15 minutes of the 911 call, the masts of the two sailboats, “Third Party” and “Pressando”, were already down. The bottoms of the masts appear to have melted. The tops of the masts and their spreaders were leaning on the boom and back stays of a Hinckley that was adjacent to “Third Party,” the Hunter sailboat.

The oxygen-depleting foam that firefighters used to smother the fire was still visible Tuesday morning. Firefighters went thru 16 5-gallon buckets to suppress the fire on the two boats. In the light of day, puffs of the foam occasionally drifted in to the air.

Witnesses say that the flames were so intense, firefighters in full gear were crouched down on the dock, busy at first with the task of wetting down the hulls of the adjacent sailboats to keep the blaze from spreading beyond the two boats already engulfed. They went through 16 5-gallon buckets of a chemical foam that smothers flames. The fire at times burned green and blue, owing to the chemical make up of the boats and their contents.

In foreground, the Catalina and then the Hunter sailboats that burned at Sea Harbour in the early hours Tuesday. The masts of both appeared to have melted and the upper portions came to rest on the finger pier and the boom and stays of an adjacent Hinckley. In background is the Pierce Creek channel and the Neuse River.

While the firemen struggled to contain the blaze, Dick and Gail Shaw were sleeping on their boat further down “A” dock and unaware of what was happening a few slips away. What woke him up, Dick Shaw says, was the sound of the firefighters’ oxygen depletion alarms going off about 25 minutes after they started fighting the fire. Gail Shaw says that when they poked her head out to investigate, the scene seemed like something out of a dream.

“Third Party” burned to almost the waterline.

As visitors to Sea Harbour came by Tuesday morning and focussed on the charred remains of the two sailboats, others got to work on cleaning up the soot on boats just across the dock. They could scrub away the film of black particulates, but the smell of the burned boats clung to the damp air.

Sue and Dick Schneider worked for hours Tuesday cleaning soot from their friends’ boat which was in a slip just across from the two boats that were destroyed. The Schneiders live on a boat at another dock in the marina and say they were awoken by an explosion they first thought was a gunshot. It was, they believe, one of the propane tanks. On calling 911 they were told that the fire department was already en route.

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Tuesday afternoon, Melinda Coleman wondered about the people whose boats had burned and said it was hard to look at the blackened remains of the boat in the slip next to hers. She and John Knox had planned to be at Sea Harbour and stay on their Pearson 365 “Here and Now” Monday night, which would have put them right next to “Pressando” as it burned. That became a “what if” after they were delayed in getting out of Raleigh Monday.

The Pearson 365 “Here and Now” appeared to suffer only minimal damage from the fire at the adjacent slips. The owners, John Knox and Melinda Coleman were among the many boat owners especially grateful to firefighters for keeping the fire from spreading..

The intense heat melted the radar unit and some other plastic parts on adjacent boats.

When Melinda and John arrived Tuesday afternoon, they were thankful on many levels, but especially to the firefighters for containing the blaze. Their work hosing down the adjacent boats meant that damage on “Here and Now” was kept to a minimum – the plastic radar unit mounted on a mast and a plastic dorade vent were deformed by the heat. As per the insurance company, they were going to have the “Here and Now” hauled and gone over to make sure nothing else was compromised.

But all that seemed secondary Tuesday to Melinda’s sense of appreciation and gratefulness to the Station 19 firefighters who fought the blaze for more than three hours. As she noted more than once, “they were all volunteers!”

John Knox and Melinda Coleman arrived at their boat Tuesday afternoon, both relieved to find the damage minimal to their Pearson 365 “Here and Now” and taken aback by the destruction in the next slip. Melinda made a special point of thanking Pete Ritchie, one of the volunteer firemen who worked to put out the fire and keep it from spreading to adjacent boats. (Pete reluctantly agreed to be photographed.) .

The volunteer firemen’s efforts and the timing of the call to 911, she says, kept the fire from becoming a much larger catastrophe.

Landon Winstead, dockmaster of the marina agreed. Without the firefighters’ hard work, he said, “it could’ve been a lot worse. We feel extremely fortunate and thankful for the firefighters’ efforts and the job they did.”

Gordon Kellogg looks out on his destroyed Catalina 36, “Pressando”. A musical term, it means “pressing on.”

Winstead says it’s the first time the marina has faced anything like this. He noted that the layout of many marinas could make them susceptible to fires spreading fast along the docks. (It’s why, he says, Sea Harbour doesn’t allow open grill cooking off the sterns of boats in slips.)

Pete Ritchie meanwhile says that in his years with the Southeast Pamlico Volunteer Fire Department this was the biggest sailboat fire they’d dealt with. Usually, he says, the boat fires they attend to are shrimp boats where welding work has recently been done.

Divers with Tow Boat US out of Beaufort were in the water Tuesday afternoon, preparing two boats that had burned earlier in the day at Sea Harbour Yacht Club. The boats were eventually towed to Deaton’s boat yard.

Inflatable bladders were necessary for the burned boats. One burned very close to its waterline and the inflation was necessary to put the boat higher in the water before being towed to Deaton’s.

Wheel of the Hunter “Third Party.”

One of the pilings that will have to be replaced.

Posted Wednesday April 15, 2009 by Melinda Penkava