For those of you who have been on the Hunter Owners site for a few years, you may remember the name of Scott Blahnik from Mandeville, LA (across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans). Scott had a 26 ft Hunter - yesterday while he was about 5 miles out in the lake the boat caught on fire. Scott and 2 crewmembers had to abandon ship and luckily had life preservers and were towing a dingy, which they moved into where a sheriff's patrol picked them up. The boat burned down to the waterline. The fire started below in the engine compartment and advanced so fast it burned Scott slightly on the legs as he was escaping from below. You can read the account in todays New Orleans Times-Picayune, www.nola.com. I hope Scott will see this and let us know what happened.
Boat Burns, Crew Safe
- Thread starter jlogan
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Fire
I'm sorry to hear about the fire. I am from Baton Rouge, and used to sail in the lake all the time. I couldn't find an account of incident on NOLA.com Was it an electrical fire? ajp
I'm sorry to hear about the fire. I am from Baton Rouge, and used to sail in the lake all the time. I couldn't find an account of incident on NOLA.com Was it an electrical fire? ajp
Just missed that event
We had sailed our '90 27' Hunter through the same waters only about an hour or so before that incident by the way we read it. Was suprised that we didn't notice he smoke, but the Causeway may have obscured it. We always have more than enough PFDs with us, but don't tow a dinghy. I was worried about an outboard that was not pumping a full stream of water and imagined a potential fire from that.
We had sailed our '90 27' Hunter through the same waters only about an hour or so before that incident by the way we read it. Was suprised that we didn't notice he smoke, but the Causeway may have obscured it. We always have more than enough PFDs with us, but don't tow a dinghy. I was worried about an outboard that was not pumping a full stream of water and imagined a potential fire from that.
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