John jumped up from his chair (affectionately named Chair John) and raced out to our terrace. I followed. There was black-as-night smoke billowing up into the sky in front of us. And no fire engine sirens to be heard.
“It’s down on the beach, ” John says. “I bet it’s the boat.” So I check Facebook to see if anyone’s posted anything. Nothing yet. Then I Facebook Messenger my friend Kim Priebe who lives a stone’s throw from the washed-up-and-abandoned boat on the beach.
“It’s the boat, ” she confirms. “We’re not home but we’re at El Timon and watching it burn from across the bay. Antonio just took a picture.”
I get back on Facebook and the chatter has erupted. I see that Anne Pound posted a close-up photo of the boat being burned by what look like firemen. (Well, they have firemen-looking hard hats and vests and hoses anyway.) Are they burning it or putting it out?
We’d talked to a local boat builder many months back who’d told us he was hired to cut the boat up and haul it away but that it was going to be a really hard job.
That job was never done.
This morning John and I take our usual walk on the beach.
(The full-tree-now-driftwood that came down the swollen river with all the rain exactly two weeks ago is still on the beach, in case you were wondering.)
And there we see the charred and blackened hull of the boat.
It’s the hull of the sailboat that washed up on the northern beach of Bahia San Juan on October 4, 2017 during Tropical Storm Nate, the one that was going to get cut up by the local boat builder but wasn’t, and instead was burned yesterday.
It is still on the beach, but now as a toxin-spewing, smoking blackened hulk.
John warned me not to get, or at least not stay, downwind of it for long.
I wonder how the “firemen” kept the palm trees and nearby houses from torching.
I wonder if its Australian owners have kept up on its plight (they had just bought the boat but were in Australia when Tropical Storm Nate hit and the boat’s caretaker was also out of town at the time).
And I wonder how long the blackened-mass-of-boat remains will continue to remain on our shore.
