Phil Joy’s race weekend was cut short by a phone call Saturday afternoon. It was Benicia Police Department.

“I was out at the track, and got a call from the PD saying ‘We’re here with the Coast Guard, do you mind if we go in?’ I said no, go right ahead,” Joy said.

The problem: There was oil in the water at the boatyard Joy owns off First Street, leaking from one of his boats.

Joy, who drives Legends race cars in National Auto Sport Association events, was at Sonoma Raceway. He asked his wife, Celeste, to go to the boatyard to see if there was anything police needed.

Celeste called back and said he needed to get down there right away.

“I guess it was some diesel,” he said. “It didn’t look like that much, but a gallon of diesel will spread a lot of rainbows.”

Joy called Jimmy Ponder of Ponder Environmental Services. Ponder and his crew arrived by 3 p.m. “We put about 350 feet of absorbent boom around the boat,” Joy said.

He said at first he thought the leak was coming from a landing craft he purchased recently that had been part of the Mothball Fleet of old Navy craft in Suisun Bay. “There was some water and some oil in the bilge, so we sucked that out, but they wanted the tanks emptied too. Ponder’s truck sucked all of the diesel out,” he said.

But Joy saw more rainbows in the water. “I looked inside (the tugboat) LoTide and there was diesel fuel inside the bilge … ‘Wait a minute boys! I think we got the wrong boat after we cleaned out the other one.’”

Ponder’s team cleaned out the fuel from the LoTide’s bilge and tanks. Joy pulled the boat out of the water, boomed it off, and discovered damage to the bottom.

“There’s a big gash on the bottom, right under a fuel tank. That’s where it was seeping out, slowly,” he said.

“It’s high and dry now. There’s a guy coming out to measure the thickness (of the hull).

“We really dodged a bullet. I called and thanked the PD for calling so quickly. It wasn’t a lot of fuel, but it was enough to make some colors in the water, someone probably saw or smelled it and called the Coast Guard.

“We made them (the Coast Guard) happy, they were amazed at how fast Ponder got down there,” Joy said. “In about an hour Ponder was down there with his crew and cleaned it up.”