Gone in 180 seconds!

"It was all ablaze and we were off in just on three minutes."

This was how Noel Elliott described the scene you see here of his converted timber trawler Mischief when it was suddenly ablaze on its mooring in Airlie Beach.

"The most horrendous thing is how quickly all the wiring burns. Remember, on a boat. you’re encased in the stuff. It’s a bit like being in a single garage with wires in all the roof and wall cavities, as well as the floor," he warns.

"When you get a short circuit like us, you have 820amps burning the wiring. Everything explodes and burns instantaneously," Elliott added.

Elliott is one level-headed chap. He was a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal New Zealand Navy and a clearance diver by trade, so when he says "it was terrifying, so, so quick, and virtually impossible to put out," you should pay attention.

Remember, for many years, Elliott he had been through every exercise and training you could imagine in his line of work. He has been kind enough to not only recount the following terrible boating experience for us, but also proffer two things he considers mandatory now.

DRY POWDER EXTINGUISHERS
"I used five dry powder extinguishers, ranging in size from 2.5kg to 5kg. All you get back are face-fulls of powder and toxic fumes. You cannot see or breathe and the powder comes back at you with interest," he said.

"You only get the one chance to stop a fire aboard and you must do it within about 30 seconds, otherwise it is time to clear out. Powder extinguishers are hopeless in an engine room and I now have automatic foam installed," said Elliott.

"Everything now has a kill switch. In the old boat, the cut-offs were on the fuse board at the for’ard end of the engine room, which on all boats are pretty pokey by nature, and in a blaze you just cannot get to them!"

So what led to this catastrophic boat fire?

BATTERY ISSUES
"It was Boxing Day and I had just completely fully charged the batteries through a 60amp charger powered off an auxiliary genset. The boat was also fully bunkered and provisioned, ready for an impending trip to the Solomon Islands," recounts Elliott.

"It was 0950hrs and I thought to myself, I want to watch the start of the Hobart. So I put the TV on, switched to both banks and that is when it happened. Three minutes later the boat was gone," he explains.

A major short circuit had occurred when a cell in one of the deep-cycle batteries had collapsed and, virtually instantaneously, the whole system was on drain.

"As soon as I saw smoke from the battery isolator I tried to go back to "one" or "off" [on the battery isolator], but it had fused inside by that time and was rendered useless.

"I heard crackling, came out of wheelhouse, lifted the lid on the hold and used two extinguishers right there and then.

"The deckhead and bulkheads were all smoking, and I used another extinguisher on what I could see. I then went back down into the engine room and sprayed yet another.

"From there I went back to wheelhouse, fell into engine room in the black smoke that was already billowing furiously and crawled aft along the deck, throwing the fuel isolators on and grabbing the mobile as I went.

"My dog, Tosh, was on the marlin platform already and he then jumped in the tinny. I virtually fell over it all trying to get in quickly!”

PAINTER SAVES THE DAY
A real point of interest here is that it was only a few weeks earlier that Elliott had been given the opportunity to buy a stainless steel 4WD-style grab hook. This he had mounted to the transom to hold the painter attached to the tender.

This simple, yet very effective method is undoubtedly one of the reasons Noel is here today to recount his tale.

Friends at Airlie Beach, where he was on a swing mooring, saw him coming out of the black smoke, grab the loop off the hook, and then both of them got into the tinny. They say that no sooner had Noel and Tosh cast off than Mischief went up in a big explosion.

"I reckon that if I had to actually untie the tender, then I would have been right in amongst that explosion," recounts Elliott.

By way of demonstration, there was another tinny atop the deckhead before the fire. When they returned to inspect the damage, there was no trace of it all. Equally, an alloy, twin-tank dive compressor and two dive bottles were nowhere to be seen either. All that was left of the latter where the two top valves.

This goes to show of the intense heat a fire like this can generate.

"The smoke was totally horrific, but also the noise was quite disconcerting. We had four nine-kilogram gas bottles and two packets of the ones you use in camping stoves," Elliott says.

"The roar and crackle were intense, so much so that the VMR people who live on the hill at Shute Harbour heard them, then saw the puffs and got straight on the blower to the authorities."

EMERGENCY RESPONSE
Indeed the first responders were the locals, then the Water Police about 20 minutes later. They went ashore to get the Fire Brigade, but by now Mischief was just burning away.

Sadly for Noel and Tosh, they had just finished painting the boat the day before and were due to go to Port Douglas and then to the Solomon Islands.

According to Adam Brown from Pantaenius Insurance: "It was pretty clear that it was an accident and we were able to make an informed decision quickly. It took just 24 hours to appoint a surveyor to inspect the damage, and the report was also prompt, arriving just a few days after that."

"Pantaenius provided this independent report at their cost within days of the incident, so that the settlement could also be reached within days of the event," Brown says.

NEW BOAT FOR ELLIOTT
All settled, Noel and Tosh have now got  into another boat to resume their South Pacific adventures.

Elliott went and sourced another 42’ trawler, which the ex-pat Kiwi has called Kiwa (Maori for protector of the seas). She too has been converted to become a cruiser and her reconditioned, six-cylinder, 120hp Gardiner will drive her along at 7.5kts, burning a miserly 5-7lt/hr.

Noel and Tosh are due for that Solomon Island trip after their little hiccup. Some fishing and diving on wrecks will be highlights, with Noel keen to re-find a WWII submarine he thought he saw of the coast of Papua New Guinea when he was working on another job.