Slept Right Through It

Friday night I was in bed and asleep by 11:00. Sometime later, I heard yelling in the park – probably drunk kids, I thought. And a little later, a lot of sirens – probably coming down Lake Shore Drive, I thought. I went back to sleep.

But Saturday morning, more sirens. We came out on deck to see the sky between us and downtown filled with billowing clouds. Two docks south of us, firemen swarmed the dock. When they stepped back, a charred mess of a boat was left in the water.


What happened? Word on the dock – ‘cause you know every boater was out there to see what was going on – is that around midnight a citronella candle on a fly bridge went a little too high and ignited the bimony (the canvas canopy over the bridge). The guy panicked; the bimony went up in flames.

“How could you sleep through that?” our neighbor asked Mark. “There were flames 100 feet high and 200 people out here.”

All the boats are covered in soot. Not only is the boat charred, but the two boats on either side are damaged, too.

By the next day, they were hauled out, and things have returned to relative normal around Belmont Harbor.

Check out the Chicago Sun-Times story.