This story first appeared in the Midcoast Update, a newsletter published every Tuesday and Friday morning. Sign up here to receive stories about the midcoast delivered to your inbox each week, along with our other newsletters.
Nothing looked out of the ordinary at Belmont Boatworks on a quiet morning earlier this week. With the arrival of winter, many of the region’s boat owners had already brought their vessels in to be stored at the site in white plastic wrap.
But the midcoast boatyard was doing something unusual that day. For the first time in recent memory, it was holding a public sale of three boats whose owners originally brought them there to be stored, then abandoned them: a pair of sailboats measuring 26 and 28 feet, and a 25-foot Grady-White powerboat. One of them came with a trailer. Another had an inflatable dinghy.
At the front desk, a worker spent the morning filing paperwork and greeting customers. By the end of the day, no one had responded to the public listings for the abandoned vessels.
That meant the boatyard would soon have to pay a waste facility in Winterport to accept them, salvage what parts it could and dispose of the rest.
“It’s mostly a legal way that we’re trying to make space for customers in our yard, for boats that haven’t moved in years,” officer manager Reid Garrity said.
The unsuccessful midcoast boat sale was another example of how Maine’s coastal communities have been affected by a growing problem of abandoned boats in recent years. Local, state and federal officials have increasingly struggled to get owners to deal with the derelict vessels they’ve left in the state’s waters.
The most dramatic recent example of this was the Jacob Pike, an 83-foot historic sardine carrier that sank off Harpswell last winter, had to be raised by the U.S. Coast Guard, and was disposed of due to the pollution risk from its leaking fuel — despite a descendant of its namesake unsuccessfully trying to preserve it.
Many other newer and less glamorous vessels have also been left to list in Maine harbors in recent years, which some officials have attributed to a frenzy of pandemic-era boat-buying by Mainers who didn’t realize how much it would cost to maintain their watercraft in the long run.
“The market of boats itself has changed so much because so many people bought boats during COVID,” said Dan Miller, the owner of Belmont Boatworks. “A lot of them bought new boats. It turns out they don’t even like boats, and a lot of them bought projects that it turns out that now they don’t have time to work on.”
While southern Maine officials have clearly identified a recent trend of abandoned boats, it’s less clear how pervasive it has become farther up the midcoast. Travis Otis, a deputy harbormaster in Searsport, does not see it as a serious local issue.
“The cost of owning a boat increases as you go further south,” Otis said. “If somebody can’t afford their mooring space anymore, or can’t afford dockage space, they say, ‘Well, we’ll just put it in the mangroves, and it’s somebody else’s issue.’”
Nevertheless, it has gotten to the point where Belmont Boatworks had to hold a sale for three of its abandoned boats to make room for other vessels, with buyers on the hook to pay any outstanding fees to the boatyard.
Garrity, the officer manager, said that trying to sell the boats is a last resort before junking them. Before it gets to that point, the boatyard repeatedly reaches out to owners to ask them to recover them and settle any debts. In some cases, it delivers boats back to the properties of their owners.
If those measures don’t work, the boatyard must pay to haul the abandoned vessels away and dispose of them at DM&J Waste in Winterport, as well as having any fuel and other fluids removed.
“You try your best to keep it from happening,” Garrity said.
