Stranded mariner took ominous video just before Santa Rosa Island fire

A new video obtained by SFGATE shows the potential cause of a major wildfire that has burned nearly a third of the ecologically sensitive Santa Rosa Island, a beloved part of Channel Islands National Park.

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Around the time fire was spotted by fishing vessels on Friday, a stranded sailor set off a flare gun, which was believed by Coast Guard officials to have caused the fire. The blaze spread quickly on the second-largest island within “California’s Galapagos,” and is currently the state’s largest wildfire of the year.

The fire is officially listed as “under investigation” by the National Park Service, but the new video offers an explanation of what may have caused it. The video shows a wrecked sailboat ablaze on an island beach the day before the wildfire was spotted.

“Wow, that’s a hot fire, I hope I don’t start this island on fire, that wouldn’t be good,” the stranded mariner filming the scene says. The video was shared with SFGATE by an anonymous source.

The video has also been shared with a handful of people, including Carson Shevitz, a Ventura boat captain and the owner of Channel Watch Marine Services. His company does salvage and recovery operations within Channel Islands National Park, Shevitz told SFGATE, and he was contacted by the owner of the vessel that ran aground on Santa Rosa for assistance in recovering it. 

The recovery, along with the mitigation of pollution and debris, has been put on hold by the National Park Service due to the ongoing investigation, Shevitz said. But in the meantime, Shevitz said he heard the story of what happened from the mariner himself.

The mariner, a 67‑year‑old man single‑handing a 54‑foot sailboat called Wet Vette, accidentally grounded his vessel on Santa Rosa Island around 2 p.m. on Thursday, Shevitz said. The mariner apparently left the boat after it started rocking, and about an hour later, the boat caught fire. The mariner showed Shevitz timestamped photos and videos of the intense blaze, he said.

The mariner told Shevitz he hoped someone would see the smoke and come rescue him, and as the fire grew, he moved farther from the wreckage to escape the heat and smoke. He worried that the fire might spread into the dry brush around him, and ended up spending the night alone on the remote island with no cell signal while his boat continued to burn.

Although Shevitz overheard a radio broadcast by the Coast Guard Sector Los Angeles command center advising of the fire early Friday morning, he said it seemed that no one was yet aware that a person was involved. Hours later, when fishing boats approached to investigate the flames, the mariner fired flares to get their attention. He told Shevitz he launched the flares from already‑burned ground to avoid igniting vegetation and that his photos and videos show the boat on fire about 20 hours before he was rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard around noon on Friday. 

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The Coast Guard has since updated its social media post explaining that the flares started the fire, and for Shevitz, the mariner’s story and images offer a plausible alternative. 

“Based on the information available at this time, Channel Watch’s preliminary understanding is that the island fire appears more likely to have originated from embers produced by the burning vessel than from the distress flares,” Shevitz wrote in an Instagram post.

The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment about the video.

The fire has charred over 16,900 acres and is currently 26% contained. As of Wednesday, 135 firefighting personnel are battling the blaze, and multiple air tankers, including a modified Boeing 737, are being used to drop water and fire retardant.

Santa Rosa Island is the second largest of the Channel Islands and home to six native plant species that exist nowhere else on Earth. On Sunday, the blaze burned through a grove of extremely rare Torrey pines, which only grow on Santa Rosa Island and in San Diego in the U.S. The amount of damage to the area remains unknown.