Well I guess after reading about other peoples unfortunate experiances, I had one of my own today.
I was underway about two hours into my run when I began to lose my electronics. After about five minutes of trying to figure out what was happening, I decided to check the engine room and generator. When I cracked the hatch thick white smoke billowed out. I shut down the starbord engine and generator. There were no flames visible but something was smoldering. Fortunataly I was only five munutes from the end of my run where I was able to get the passengers off the boat. I continued back to my home port where it was determined that there was a stress crack in the fuel retention tank.
When the boat was fueled the night before by another crew, there was an appearent overfill and about 5 gallons of diesel leaked from the retention tank into the engine room and onto the engine exhaust lagging. The lagging soaked up the fuel and after being heated up by the hot exhaust pipe the lagging began to smolder. Thank goodness it did not go up in flames.
I guess the point here is that the lesson learned is to keep up those engine room checks while underway, keep practicing those fire drills, abandon ship drills and man overboard drills because when it happens, everything happens fast.
I've trained for situations like this during my many years of boating and when it happened to me all that training just fell into place.
This was the closest I've come to having to fire off that "mayday" call, but at the end of the day the boat and crew made it home.
I was underway about two hours into my run when I began to lose my electronics. After about five minutes of trying to figure out what was happening, I decided to check the engine room and generator. When I cracked the hatch thick white smoke billowed out. I shut down the starbord engine and generator. There were no flames visible but something was smoldering. Fortunataly I was only five munutes from the end of my run where I was able to get the passengers off the boat. I continued back to my home port where it was determined that there was a stress crack in the fuel retention tank.
When the boat was fueled the night before by another crew, there was an appearent overfill and about 5 gallons of diesel leaked from the retention tank into the engine room and onto the engine exhaust lagging. The lagging soaked up the fuel and after being heated up by the hot exhaust pipe the lagging began to smolder. Thank goodness it did not go up in flames.
I guess the point here is that the lesson learned is to keep up those engine room checks while underway, keep practicing those fire drills, abandon ship drills and man overboard drills because when it happens, everything happens fast.
I've trained for situations like this during my many years of boating and when it happened to me all that training just fell into place.
This was the closest I've come to having to fire off that "mayday" call, but at the end of the day the boat and crew made it home.