A man was lucky to escape without serious injury when the boat he was living on caught fire in the middle of Comox Bay over the weekend.
Witness Bob Wilson was at a nearby pub when he spotted plumes of smoke rising from a sailboat in the bay Sunday.
“Real scary,” he said. “I don’t know if he had propane or what happened but it went up and it was a lot of flame and lots of thick black smoke.”
But in a strange coincidence, it turned out that Wilson knew the boat owner, named Harold.
He managed to flee the boat just as the fire was starting.
“We could see him getting away from the flames, there was like, big black smoke and lots of flames and he was rowing away,” Wilson said. “And then there was another fellow out there on his boat that had a Zodiac and he came along side.”
The boater suffered burn injuries and was transferred to a marine rescue boat before being taken to shore.
Paramedics attended to him and took him to hospital as Comox crews arrived to the scene in their fire boat.
“In this case, it was 100 per cent vital,” Capt. Corey Brooks said of the vessel. “This was the piece of equipment that we needed to properly mitigate the hazard that was in front of us.”
The vessel was kept moored to where it was anchored but in the end, the damage was too great and it sank.
Brooks said crews have responded to fires in the bay before, but it’s tough to fight blazes on boats that are far from shore, especially those with people living aboard.
“It’s always a challenge because of the unknown, not knowing who’s on board,” Brooks said. “We don’t know a lot of times until we get on scene, or somebody has told us that has been in the vicinity.”
The boat’s owner was expected to be released from hospital with minor injuries Monday.
