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A fire early this morning destroyed two boats at Sea Harbour Marina in Oriental. The boats lost were a Catalina 36 “Pressando” owned by Oriental residents Gordon and Anne Kellogg, and next to it, a Hunter sailboat, “Third Party” owned by Mike Spangler of Shelby.

Firefighters say they were called to the blaze just before 1am. The marina credits nearby resident Sylvan Friedman, whose home is just across from the docks, with calling 911. Firefighters and emergency crews were on the scene within 15 minutes.

Firefighter Eric Kindle says that by then, the masts of the two boats were already down. Kindle says the fire crews worked to keep the fire from spreading, by continuously hosing down the boats in adjacent slips. Those efforts paid off.

There were signs of melting in the radar units high up in the masts of the two neighboring boats, some heat damage to sail covers and the Hinckley that was downwind had some charring on the rubrail, But overall, the firefighters contained the blaze to the two boats. Eric Kindle says they went through 16 five-gallon buckets of foam to put out the blaze.

The masts of the two burned boats were shortened by the blaze and came to rest on the fingerpier and on the boom and rigging of this Hinkley Bermuda 40. (That smudge on the cabin came from the burned roller-furled genoa of the Catalina two slips away.) The Hinckley shown here — and the Pearson on the other side of the burned boats — appeared to suffer only minimal damage thanks to the efforts of firefighters who spent much time hosing them down.

The fire was so intense, that Bill Michne, captain of the First Responders and a slip owner, says that the masts of other boats were so clearly illuminated they could be seen from the parking lot a few hundred yards away.

The cause of the fire is not yet known. The Coast Guard was to investigate, and the Hunter and Catalina were to be eventually floated so they were higher in the water. To prevent any charred pieces from floating away or, in the event some fuels did not burn off in the fire, a TowBoat US crew from Deatons on Tuesday morning arranged a boom around the two burned boats.

Gordon and Anne Kellogg, the owners of “Pressando” were notified of the fire in the early hours of the morning and were at the docks as their Catalina burned. Gordon Kellogg says they’d had the boat for 5 years and had just gotten it out of a yard after three weeks of work was done to it. Anne Kellogg, visiting the site on Tuesday morning says they had just been making plans for a late spring trip up to the Chesapeake on “Pressando”.

She said she was happy that there hadn’t been winds of the kind that have been buffetting the area lately, and which would have spread the flames to even more vessels.

Posted Tuesday April 14, 2009 by Keith N. Smith