Saturday 16 November Smokin' our way to Admiral marina

Some might call it karma, some coincidence but when you unsubscribe from Raymarine's newsletter and just two days later your Raymarine chartplotter spontaneously combusts when you're motoring up the busy Malacca Straits I call it bloody bad luck.

We were making day passages from Johor to the second stop of the rally at Admiral Marina near Port Dickson. Two hours short of our destination I was down below on another baking hot day making lunch. David called down to ask if I had burnt something - not possible with a sandwich lunch. His next point to investigate was going to be the engine room under the cockpit floor but as he bent to lift the hatch he saw flames licking out from under the chart plotter at the helm.

lucky only one port burnt

melting hot day - the power cord

Having done the RYA survival at sea course we knew the potential hazards of a fire at sea. I rushed up with a fire extinguisher and a wet towel (with hindsight the fire blanket should have been first choice over the towel) to find David blowing the flames out! Three big puffs and he had it under control. All cables disconnected from the unit and a quick turn on the fixings which hold the plotter in a cradle and it was out and on the cockpit floor.

Once we had got over the feeling of a lucky escape, fortunate David was sitting in front of the thing when it shorted and caught fire and not changing a sail or just away from the helm for two minutes, fortunate it was easy to remove the complete unit compared with one fitted into a panel. If we hadn't been able to put out this small fire quickly it could have been a disaster with other instruments melting or the bimini catching alight. Once we had passed this we then had to question why should it have caught fire in the first place? We were motoring in calm dry conditions. There had been no power outages, no indications the plotter had a malfunction but 'puff' the cable over heated and the rubber caught fire. For anyone reading this who also has a Raymarine chartplotter, the model is the E80 which we bought in St Marten in the Caribbean in April 2009.

Now if anyone asks us the best way to burn money I'd suggest a Raymarine E80 chartplotters catches fire very easily.

We continued the rest of our trip using a Garmin hand-held GPS which David has providently loaded with the local charts two days before I cancelled the Raymarine newsletter. Coincidence? or a conspiracy theory?