There better be smoke alarms.
And great neighbors.
We are grateful to have both. This is the short story. For those who want more detail, there will be a follow up post about this incident sometime in the future.
It all started when I had received a phone call at 9 pm Tuesday evening from my dock neighbor who lives on her boat in St Petersburg. Several thoughts ran through my head. First was that this call could not be coming with good news at this time of day. Then the next thought was along the lines of "Don’t be negative. I’m sure she’s calling for something fun, or perhaps she has some question for us about the boat that is easy to answer". So I smiled and answered the phone cheerfully. However, as you may suspect, she was calling about a concern.
I could hear lots of beeping in the background as she explained to me that she that there were alarms going off from inside of our boat, and she could smell the odor of electrical burning. Unfortunately my first thought was correct.
Jimmy and I were in our car by 9:30 pm hitting the road for St. Pete from Tallahassee. When we arrived at the marina parking lot at 2 am, I was relieved to not see any fire engines around. After getting an update from Tiffany, we felt safe enough to sleep in the very smelly boat. She and another person from a nearby dock never saw the flames that filled the cabin up with smoke and they did not see any visible damage to the boat.
The search for the source started before sunrise. Eventually we signs were leading us to the conclusion that the inverter was the source. There was a little bit of soot visible on the front of the unit and some line (rope) located beneath the inverter looked lightly charred. What really concerned us was that the inverter is located directly beneath the propane locker… Jimmy made some phone calls and scheduled an electrician to come out and do a safety check for us later in the afternoon.
Upon his review he indicated just how lucky we were. The inverter was the source. When we examined the inside of the inverter the electrician commented that this was “one for the books” meaning something he had not seen before (photo below). Thankfully, we will never know how things would of evolved it Tiffany had not acted quickly in calling us, then shutting down power sources, including unplugging the boat from shore power.
I left a lot of details out of this post. Jimmy and I plan to share a detailed account of this incident. To wrap up this shorter version of the story , I want to emphasize that smoke detectors are incredibly important! Thanks to them, and our awesome neighbor, our cruising plans remain intact.
Comments