On Wed, 04 Jul 2012 10:41:09 -0400, Oscar wrote:

Anybody?

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We had a little excitement here this morning. We're at a local south
west Florida marina with a bunch of friends for the holiday, all on
their own boats. My wife went out for a few minutes this morning
after breakfast to kibitz with the other women. She came running
back a minute later yelling that Rich's boat was on fire. Rich has a
40 something, twin diesel Silverton and is docked directly behind us.
I grabbed a 5 pound dry chem extinguisher and went running back to see
what I could do. The engine room hatches were open and smoke was
coming out so I asked where the fire was, pulled the pin on the
extinguisher and prepared to do what I could. The owner waved me off
as he was already talking to the fire department on his cell phone and
they were ordering everyone off the boat. They showed up a few
minutes later with a crew from a ladder truck toting air packs,
extinguishers, fire axes, a thermal maging camera and a huge amount of
other gear. Meanwhile we turned off the shore power dock breaker and
unplugged the cable just to make sure.

In the end it turned out to be an over heated/burned out battery
charger and it rapidly turned into a non-event once the power was
removed. The owner claims to not know what brand of charger it was
but I'll try to find out and put in on my "avoid" list. Supposedly it
is a marine quality, permanent charger that had been professionally
installed recently. I've heard of several other battery charger
fires on boats but they were all from small automotive type portable
units, attached with alligator clips.