It’s Boat Fire Season Let’s Get Ready – RSPV
We hope you keep the third Monday of every month marked on your calendar. We’re excited for this meeting. – Love to learn? We look forward to seeing you and please RSVP.
The “boat fire” season is upon us as we saw this morning (10/8/18) with the boat/ boat house fire at the Everett Marina. Monday evening we are going to help you prepare with safety tips and how to be ready with answers for the “what if’s”. We are excited to have several members help as we will actually take ourselves through a fire drill – Yes, like me, you’ve probably never done one. I just didn’t know where to start.
Remember Knot-A-Boat? It offered a hands-on way of learning and remembering knots. Learning and remembering the steps for fire safety requires hands-on experience too.
Wait till you see our “pretend boat” for fire safety. We’ll have a fire blanket to use on our “pretend galley fire” and imagine our way through an engine room fire as well as those pesky electrical fires. We’ll even have “empty” fire extinguisher canisters to use. There will be a ditch bag to grab as you escape your very own “pretend boat emergency”. You’ll see what’s in a ditch bag and learn how to put one together – I don’t have one, do you?
But, before we get to the fun of practicing we’ll learn the steps of a fire drill. Remember grade school and how they taught you what to expect before they rang that very, very loud bell? Please join us as Margaret Pommert, Juli Tallino, Cindy Faw, Maggie Murphy, Marilyn Michael and I will bring you a fun and valuable evening. Your ideas and participation are welcome (no ball hogs, though, as they say in little people soccer).
Come be inspired and help inspire as we get ready for a safe boat fire season. Bring tips or photos you may have on fire safety to share on a dry erase board or on paper we can tack up.
We’re excited for this meeting – we love to learn and hope you do too. Look forward to seeing you and please RSVP to nwwbviv@gmail.com. (link to location information)
Vivian Strolis 206-819-2265
Marilyn Michael 2063220633
And…if you think dealing with fire or potential fire onboard is rare, the short tale below of a happenstance meeting of four gals chatting at a NWWB meeting may surprise you.
One evening at a Northwest Women in Boating meeting Penny, Pat, and I stood riveted by Pam’s tale…“You’re not going to believe this, I woke up the other night to my boat filled with smoke!” A liveaboard’s, or anyone’s nightmare, it was fascinating, instructive and, thankfully, ended safely. She had started up her onboard heating system for winter. A motor on the pump to her hot water circulating system had overheated. The burning was confined to the inside of the pump but resulted in immense smoke. On her way to the fire extinguisher, she, for some reason, shut down the furnace and before looking for the source, she shut off power to the boat. Pam sells boats for a living, loves living aboard with her daughter and as scary as the experience was, she saw it as character building and another unique adventure of her chosen lifestyle.
What was interesting but, I’ve learned not unusual in a group of boaters, was that after her tale her rapt audience of three each began sharing personal onboard fire/smoke experiences. Pat’s was the most riveting. She and her husband had just finished renovating a 1985 boat and were starting to enjoy the holiday season. That evening they planned to take out friends and family for the Christmas Parade so had turned the Espar heater on to warm the boat before running last minute errands. Returning home, her husband went down to the boat at the dock off their house on Lake Washington. Looking in he couldn’t see anything through the smoke. When he opened the door, flames emerged. They lost the boat to an electrical fire. They lived through every boater’s nightmare. Pat, later widowed, is still an enthusiastic boater. She enjoys taking out family and friends and taking interesting classes on all nature of boating skills.
Penny’s tale involved a large family gathering on board while anchored in Blakely Harbor starting to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. They had just turned on the generator for the electric stove when smoke started seeping through the floorboards. Instinct overrode prudence and they did lift the engine room hatch to find the source. Fortunately they had just blown a generator hose. Using power from the inverter they managed to use the microwave and an electric frying pan to prepare the entire meal successfully. She laughed sharing that everyone actually remembers it as the most interesting Thanksgiving ever. As a result of their adventure they installed a fire suppression system in the engine room.
My story involved hoses too, and the engine onboard our newly purchased 1978 27’Newport sloop. It was our first boat. We’d put it through all the requisite surveys but had one of those, “you can’t anticipate it” events. The engine jumped its mounts while we were underway off Port Ludlow. We lucked out, because we, too, made the wrong move of jumping below to find the cause of the smoke. We had oil on hot engine parts from pulled hoses but no major damage. It did cause us to hone our sailing skills making it home to Seattle many hours later that day (with some help from a copy of Colgate’s Sailing Theory…but that’s another story.
