Fire Destroys Several Docked Boats in La Paz

As if Mexico hasn’t been through enough this year! We received a call yesterday from Latitude reader Tim Prouty from Sausalito, who told us about a fire that destroyed several boats at Marina Palmira early Thursday morning. Tim and his wife Wren Herring are spending a few months in Mexico aboard their Ron Holland 43, Wren, and were among the first to notice the blaze.

“I woke up around 3 a.m.,” Tim told us, “no idea why.” He got up and looked outside. “There was a boat on fire on the next finger. The fire was on the port side, aft quarter of the boat. No one seemed to be aware!”

Tim grabbed his air horn and started moving up and down his dock, creating as much noise as he could to wake everyone up. Fortunately there wasn’t a lot of wind, and what there was, was coming from the east. Tim and Wren were not in danger. But the breeze running parallel to the docks was enough to fan the flames and spread the fire to the neighboring boat, and the next, and the next, until it reached the end dock.

A boat that had been tied on the outside broke free when its lines burned though. It began drifting toward the 100-ft+ megayachts, but ended up on another dock, threatening a 120-ft wood boat — “like a floating tinderbox,” Tim described. “They got that one out of the way just in time.”

Tim took this video in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Firefighters had arrived on the scene within 30 minutes and were “doing the best they could,” but by 4:30 many 35-55-ft boats had been totally engulfed, Tim told us, and by then the crews aboard docked charter boats had woken up and were moving their boats out of the way.

Mexico news sites are writing varying accounts, including that seven to 10 boats were affected. Local scuttlebutt suggests eight vessels have burned and seven have sunk on dock No. 5A.

Tim wrote this morning to say that five boats have been totally destroyed. Of those, four sank in their slips, and the fifth, the 100-ft+ Optimus, had drifted away from the dock and “burned to the waterline at the seawall.” Many other boats have suffered heat damage.

At this time there is no explanation for the outbreak. Tim said he had not heard an explosion or any other noise to alert him to the fire. To our knowledge no one was hurt.

Neil Shroyer from Marina de La Paz sent us this video he’d found on a What’s App chat group.

We hope this is the last time we report on boat fires for a long time. Wednesday we wrote about a fire in Oyster Cove, South San Francisco, involving three boats.