Those are words no one wants to hear, but especially when on a wooden boat. Granted its worse when you are in the middle of some ocean, but it was bad enough in the middle of the boatyard surrounded by other wooden boats.

I was using the sawzall to remove part of a frame in the forward section of Mahdee. Anyone familiar with such a tool knows that it not only cuts, it can shake something fiercely. This was especially true since Mahdee’s forward framing was virtually nonexistent. Then there was the saw blade. It was getting dull and of course that makes everything harder. In fact the blade was starting to smoke more than cut. I should have replaced the blade, but that meant duck walking over the top of the boat trying no to knock out a fluorescent tube in the lighting that was on the shed roof only 2-3 feet above the deck to the far side of the boat where a ladder was lashed to her side (we still didn’t have scaffolding up around the boat). That journey was too much effort, and the cutting work was just about done.

I paused for a moment and in that moment I looked aft to see a large cloud of white smoke coming out of the cracks in the deck and coverboard. For a moment I tried to reconcile how me cutting where I was could cause smoke to appear 5 feet aft of where I was working, but then I switched thoughts to the consequences. I was on a large wooden vessel that if it caught fire would probably go up in smoke in an instant. I yelled out to others in the yard “fire on Mahdee near frame 20 on the inside” and started to scramble for a water hose. I remember one being near the front of the yard, but that was way too far for a hose to reach Mahdee. The other workers were scrambling too. One ran for an extinguisher, another filled a bucket of water and a third, Renee, went inside. About the time the extinguisher and bucket were arriving at the base the ladder, from inside Mahdee, Renee yelled that all was now well.

I was doubtful that so much smoke was due to a fire small enough to be extinguished by one person with no water or extinguisher, so I went to check it out. Renee said there was no fire and that the “smoke” was from a WD40 can that fell off the clamp and wedged against the planks so that the button was depressed. What I saw was a cloud of WD40 blowing out of the cracks in the deck and hull. Thank goodness for that.

On the positive side, we put fire extinguishers where we should have had them all along and left the bucket of water on the deck for easier access should a real need come along.

David