The Continuing Biodiesel Adventures in
"Putting the 'Bean' in Caribbean"
"Putting the 'Bean' in Caribbean"
Cleaning up, picking up, packing up and moving
on
Beyond, repaired, heads for Puerto Rico
Beyond, repaired, heads for Puerto Rico
(LUPERON, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC) - Anyone who has ever experienced a house fire can understand: The damage from even the smallest fire is multiplied tenfold by the damage from smoke and water. Just imagine if nearly half of your house was smoldering or aflame - and your "home" was a boat.
That's about the situation Jim MacNeil and Rebecca Payne found Sept. 27 in the sleepy Dominican port of Luperon when they returned home from dinner in town to find a yowling cat and a cabin full of menacing black smoke on their 41-foot ketch, Beyond.
The Maryland sailors have been cruising on Beyond since November 1996 in a combination pleasure tour of the Caribbean and promotional project for soybean-based biodiesel fuel. The Maryland Soybean Board, which administers soybean checkoff funds, and NOPEC Corp., a Lakeland, Fla.-based biodiesel manufacturer, are co-sponsoring the promotion.
It may be that biodiesel helped save the boat. While no one knows for sure exactly what happened, it is thought that a lightning strike sent a powerful charge down the mast, blasting the electrical system and starting a smoldering fire in the port side. The proximity of the fire to the boat's fuel tanks threatened an explosion - 150 gallons of diesel would have spelled the end of Beyond for good. But, one of biodiesel's advantages for boaters is reduced volatility. It is combustible, not flammable, and the recommended 20 percent mix of biodiesel with petrodiesel in the tanks certainly raised the fuel's flashpoint and may have prevented an explosion.
Fellow sailors and locals raced to the rescue the night of the fire, eventually abandoning fire extinguishers in favor of a massive water pump and virtually flooding the boat to quench the fire. In the wee hours of the morning, an exhausted Jim and Rebecca were pulled off Beyond and given sanctuary for the remainder of the night. Other sailors stood guard against flare-ups or looters.
The next day, MacNeil returned to his "home" of nine years, a graceful CT ketch more than 20 years old which he had lovingly restored.
"The salvage effort was difficult. I was not sure where to start," MacNeil says. "There was wreckage all over the deck. Broken glass was strewn throughout the cabin. A book had floated into a mound of soggy catfood. A computer lay on its side, draining saltwater. Next to it lay the television, face down in a puddle. Navigational electronics and radios were melted and charred, barely recognizable. A few "wireless" microphones hung in the nav station, their cables melted or burned away."
He felt as if you might imagine: "When allowed to pause long enough to consider my predicament, I found myself paralyzed, depressed and indecisive," he explains. And, while he had scrimped and saved for years to take this cruise, it occurred to him that this might be the end.
Payne, on the other hand, was not ready to give up. "All you need, Boy, is a radio, a depth sounder, and a way to get weather, and we're going to keep on sailing!" she told him.
As word spread throughout the anchorage, help began arriving. John Womack of Kismet from Houston, Texas, had been through a fire before and knew what to do. It would be a massive undertaking: removing everything that could be unbolted, unscrewed, or dismounted from the boat, thoroughly scrubbing it all and only then replacing the contents.
Don Chatman of the Mary Margaret from Cleveland, Ohio, arranged slip space at nearby Marina Puerto Blanco, free of charge thanks to the kind owner, Lenin Hernandez.
Next, despite MacNeil's reluctance to move the boat, it was up-anchor and away under tow to the marina. There, an army of volunteers took over, as if "they knew the plan before I did," MacNeil recounts. "There were people all over my boat, removing doors, blooks, clothing, shelves, and carrying the entire contents of my boat down the dock, where another crew was waiting with buckets and cleaning agents.
"Books were gone through page by page. Pots and pans were scrubbed. Tools were wiped dry and sprayed with oil. Charts were cleaned and hung on the laundry line. Saltwater-laden seat cushions were put in tubs of clean water and stomped, like grapes, until clean. We hosed the boat from the top down, scrubbing everything. The soot, smoke stains, dry chemical residue and "high tide mark" inside the cabin began to disappear."
To keep MacNeil from dwelling on the misfortune, Payne, Chatman and Gerry DeVane of Grayling from Boca Raton, Fla., kept him focused on tasks. Still a little cloudy, he found himself sawing out burned joinery, grinding away charred fiberglass, painting away burn marks and, at one point, bypassing the toasted alternator by rigging a system to charge Beyond's batteries using different wattage lightbulbs to control the alternator's field voltage and rate of charge.
By mid-January, after a holiday trip home to find electronics and visit friends and family, MacNeil and Payne were refreshed and closer than ever to getting back under sail.
This tiny anchorage, on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, will never be forgotten. Certainly not, because of the fire, but just as certainly so for the outpouring of support from the gracious locals who saved the boat from destruction and then unselfishly volunteered the time and resources for repairs, and similarly from the fellow sailors from ports of call all over the United States who helped two Maryland sailors and their cat pick up, clean up and start again.
MacNeil is, just as certainly, changed forever, but his infectious good humor remains intact. Since the fire, he and Payne have become good friends with a local colmado owner, Thomas. The friendship started when MacNeil became addicted to Cafe Fela's light, coconutty cake, sold by the slice from the wooden counter of the lime green shack on the corner that slouches, like every shack in Luperon, in a laid-back fashion so typical of island life and in clear defiance of architecture and physics. The friendship cemented when they realized Thomas' son helped them restore the boat in the weeks following the fire.
"While I am getting excited about moving on," MacNeil says, "I will miss this place, where you can buy chicken with the feet still attached, at a tiny colmado made of sticks and branches, while Fernando (a Dominican singing sensation) and merenge blares from four-foot-high speakers causing my hips to gyrate uncontrollably as I drink a one-peso bag of water ... The Dominican Republic has exceeded the wildest expectations I ever could have imagined."
Next stop for the biodiesel adventurers will be Puerto Rico.