Yacht burns en route to Edgartown

With bright skies and a pleasant breeze, it felt like the perfect day for a cruise.

Dan Adams took his wife, 3-year-old daughter, in-laws, and a friend on his recently purchased boat, a 48-foot Alden Motor Yacht he named after his wife, Priscilla. They left Hyannis Port shortly before noon yesterday for Edgartown, where another daughter would be competing in a sailing competition.

About halfway there, Adams's wife noticed the lights flickering in the cabin below deck. Then the friend spotted a yellowish smoke coming from the starboard engine at the stern.

Twenty minutes later, after a smaller boat came to their rescue and all his passengers made it safely off, Adams, a 43-year-old filmmaker from New York, had to jump overboard to save his life. The smoke had burst into flames, he said, and the $200,000 Priscilla quickly burned to the waterline. It later sank.

''I'm just shocked and numb," he said in a telephone interview from his summer home in West Barnstable. ''I'm not sure what to think or do." Neither Adams nor officials at the Coast Guard, which sent a helicopter to the scene, knew what caused the fire.

''It's just bizarre," said Adams, who bought the boat in the fall and had it renovated over the winter. ''The boat was completely rewired and up to code."

Adams and his passengers, it turns out, were rescued by Richard Gallagher, the fire commissioner of Barnstable, who owns a smaller boat called the Wave Rider, Adams and Coast Guard officials said.

After returning safely to Hyannis and undergoing medical checks by paramedics there -- no one was injured or taken to a hospital -- one of Adams's passengers, his friend Claude Hooton, said he was counting his blessings.

''I'm just glad to be alive," the 74-year-old substitute teacher said from his home in Centerville.