Not a Drill
"FIRE IN THE ENGINE FIRE IN THE ENGINE!!!"
I come stumbing out of the head and race upstairs and out onto the deck just in time to see smoke billowing out of the galley. Crewmembers are already rushing into position with fire extinguishers and the fire hoses. We drill for this kind of thing of course and everyone knows exactly what to do.
A short time later I find myself standing in the small room just outside the engine room. Smoke still wafts out of it and is sucked up through a fan we hastily installed in the hatch above.
The first mate, Jimmy, a burley fellow with a beard like a Tolkien dwarf, hands me a fire extinguisher. "I wand you to stay low where there's oxygen. Watch the engine, if it catches fire again I want you to hose the shit out of it with the extinguisher. And call for help."
Fire extinguisher in hand, I head through the haze and through the heavy watertight door into the engine room. It's a well-lit room if it weren't for the smoke, and Noah had recently painted everything in nice bright colours. It wouldn't be a terribly small room (by boat standards) if it weren't for the engines taing up most of the space, but as most of the room is taken by machinery there's not terribly much space left to stand. Just enough for me to crouch between the two engines with one hand on the fire extinguisher, watching the still-smoking engine intently. Someone else was assigned to stand in the outer room and watch me to make sure I didn't pass out, and a third person was assigned to stand next to them and relay any potential messages from there to the rest of the ship.
The engine fortunately did not catch fire again. After twenty minutes of watching I was relieved by someone else, and it was barely smoking any more by that point.
Apparently the coolant had been leaking and the engine had run out of coolant. We have two engines (the dee sails as we like to call them), so we were able to limp to our destination (Anacortes, WA) on the remaining engine. Emergency repairs here today and we'll be able to further drag ourselves to Bellingham, tomorrow (17 miles away) (possibly even using the damaged engine?), where we'll be able to do further repairs.