Re: Boats Too Costly to Keep Are Littering Coastlines
Most of the dumping here is on the roads and in the woods. Take a ride through Camden or any other depressed town, or down along the railroad tracks and you'll fine dozens. I counted over 20 just this afternoon there. The back bays, creeks and marsh areas are littered with boats, old and new here. I just went to see a buddies property towards the shore, he's on a river, with about 40 acres of marsh land and reeds backing up to his property, we counted 8 boats dumped just in the reeds, some have been there a while, others are fairly recent. One Glastron V hull, about a 1990 or so just showed up there over the past month or two. They cut the serial number off, cut out the bow numbers on each side and the CG plate and sunk it in the marsh. Where it's at, it'll take a helicopter to get it out. There's another older skiff sunk right next to it of its port side about 15 feet.
There's several larger cabin boats just beached there, half sunk, and one older trihull with an I/O drive that drifted in the same way at high tide and got land stuck.
Take a boat ride down some of the back creeks and channels off of the back bays and in some of the game preserves, and you'll see plenty of boats dumped too. I've also seen a few launched and left at the ramp. They back in, tie up and leave, not all of them tie up or even get out if the truck I watched one guy set a boat adrift last fall, he was backing in as we were headed back to the dock, he backed in, the boat rolled off the trailer and out into open water, he drove off. We were able to push the boat with ours to shore just above the boat launch, where it soon sunk on the bank of the river. I tied it off to a tree nearby and called the police but they never came, and I wasn't waiting around any longer at 2 AM. If it had sunk in the river, it would have no doubt become a hazard to other boats. He left out the drain plug and the I/O drive was removed with only some duct tape over the hole.
(At least if he had made sure it would float, it would have at least drifted ashore further downstream rather then let it sink in the channel). He would have done better if he just dropped it in the parking lot, at least that way whoever recovered it, would have had an easier time of it instead of pulling it from the water half sunk. That boat had no numbers on it, they had been ground off with a file or something. We never got close enough on the water to tell what kind of truck it was, there's no lights and we were still 300 yards out when they pulled away in a hurry.
I picked up a small row boat the other day that got dumped along some railroad tracks in a nearby town, and a 10' jon boat that was dumped in some guys front yard just last week. It's not much of a boat but it's doing a fantastic job of making a dog house roof right now. (He called the police and they told him to just cut it up and put it out with his recyclables on trash day).
