Saturday 15 June 2013

 

Every morning at 7.30am (except Sundays) there is a ‘VHF Radio Net’ for Grenada Cruisers.  That day’s volunteer Net Controller coordinates the broadcast of various topics – Weather, including a hurricane watch, Social Events, Treasures of the Bilge (items for sale or barter), notifications of shopping buses running from each bay and Local Businesses who get to offer their wares to the cruisers over the radio.  It’s a very useful function in lots of ways for all the cruisers.

 

The first item each day is ‘Priority Traffic’ which covers navigational, health or emergency issues.  About a week ago we were sad to switch on to be told about a boat which had run aground on a reef in the adjacent bay – one of the reefs we showed in a photograph in a recent blog.  We had seen the yacht set off for Trinidad the previous afternoon with two people on board.  She was caught in a brief storm and decided to make her way back to Grenada for repairs.  In the dark the skipper mistook Mount Hartman Bay (reefs in the entrance) for Prickly Bay (which is clear water) and he ended up on the reef where he had rested all night.  The Grenada Coastguard were standing nearby as was Darren who owns Prickly Bay Marina.  Darren managed to arrange for a local shallow draft dredger to come and tow the boat off the reef.  She didn’t look to us as if she could be re-floated as the tidal range is quite small here.  Happily we were wrong and she was hauled off, didn’t take on water and was able eventually to make her way slowly back to Prickly Bay and was hauled out at Spice Island Marine.  Both crew were uninjured apart from the emotional stress of it all and as far as we know the boat is repairable.

 

It was discovered throughout this that Grenada Coastguard do not listen to Channel 16 (which is the international distress channel) unless they are already at sea.  This is about as useful as a chocolate fireguard to a boat in trouble.  In the end they had been contacted by telephone (not usually possible from a boat) by Darren of Prickly Bay.  Fortunately Darren has recently started ‘Rescue 1’, a voluntary service offering assistance to yachts in the Prickly Bay area, and he was in attendance in his RIB (Rigid Inflatable Boat) coordinating everything whilst the Coastguard vessel watched.

 

Yesterday morning there was another announcement that a large (80 ft) luxury yacht at anchor in Prickly Bay was currently on fire.  This is one of the worst things that can happen anywhere but especially on a boat and we were immediately told that the owner and crew were off the yacht and safe.  The owner had woken up about 4am to go to the toilet and stood up into smoke.  He crouched down into clear air and woke the crew member and, seeing that the fire had already taken hold in the vicinity of the switch panel, launched the dinghy and went over to another yacht who radioed and then telephoned for help.  Again the attempts to contact the Coastguard were not successful but Darren/Rescue 1 came out again.  Rescue 1 managed to get the Coastguard who came out in their fast boat (moored only half a mile away) with a hose and pump.  The Coastguard discovered that the pump didn’t work but only after smashing a window on the boat to gain access.  This of course accelerated the fire.

 

The fire brigade had been contacted and they came out with masks and oxygen tanks only to find that the tanks were empty!  This is the Caribbean after all.

 

In the meantime there were explosions on board as the fire reached first the gas cylinders (cooking gas) and then the dive tanks.  The fire had taken hold and by the end of the day she was just a shell.

 

We have seen this yacht several times in Bequia and Grenada and she is (was) a beauty.  Made of aluminium by Jongert (builders of serious one-off yachts) she was being run by the owner and paid crew for charter.  Insurers are arriving today and arrangements have been made to have her towed to a safe location and scuttled, unless the insurers decide to have her moved to a boatyard to salvage the lead in the keel and the aluminium.

 

 

These photographs were taken from a nearby boat about 6am soon after dawn.  Fortunately the yacht on the left was upwind of the fire:-

 

 

 

 

 

 

This apparently was not many minutes later:-

 

 

 

The mast was made of carbon fibre and melted and buckled:-

 

 

 

 

The remaining hulk at the end of the day, taken from the stern:-

 

 

 

 

 

The warped aluminium hull:-

 

 

 

 

There were immediate and heart warming offers of help over the VHF to the owner and crew who had just the clothes they were standing in.  One lady who comes on the radio each day promoting Cutty’s Island Tours offered accommodation which was gratefully accepted.

 

It was a horrible thing to happen and fortunately nobody was hurt.  Several meetings have since taken place with the government to try to improve the response to emergencies.