Fished the Beach Haven white Marlin tourament not good but lucky

[jag10]

This was my 20th year fishing this tourament, i fished on the North Cote. The weather wasn`t the best again and fish day 1(thursday) will be one  that I will never forget! We left the dock @ 2am heading for the willmington cayon, seas were 5 to7 winds about 15 to 20. around 4am we woke up to a smoke filled salon,and the engines shut down. the captain yells down saying he has a fire alarm going off in the engine room. at that moment we hear the halon system go off. i was sleeping in the side stat room and could not see anything through the smoke. the guys open the hatch to the engine room and find the starboard motor turbo on fire. i end up geting out of the salon by going throught the front hatch, and made my way back and into the cockpit. we used 3 fire extinguishers to try and put the fire a out but it kept coming back, as a last resort we had to use about 25 gallons of sea water to put the fire out. we were able to to get the port motor restarted and able to make the 30 mile trip back to port. the cause of the fire was due to a oil seal on the exhust side of the turbo going bad.

 

On a positive note: we were able to fish the tournaments final day(saturday) thanks to Ken on the Intruder out of Barnagate, who loaned us his boat for the day. and we were able to catch and release a white marlin on saturday and ended up getting a little pocket money for the release on day 2.

 

I hope that no one will ever have to deal with this type of emergency at sea.

keep safe and fish on!!!!

 

[BowhunterNJ]

Wow man, that had to be scary as hell!  Glad you guys got back OK, and getting out on another boat and releasing a white for some cash truly made that a weekend you'll never forget!

[Faster]

A boat full of point beach party boat mates won with a fat bigeye, right?

Edited July 29, 2013 by Faster

[Gruntmaster]

pics??