PORTLAND, Maine — The M/V Eagle, a fiberglass, center console runabout with a small forward cabin, sat in the low-tide mud near Tukey’s Bridge Thursday afternoon. Its decks were a mess, swamped with dry seaweed, faded buoys and other junk.
Secured in place with two shore lines and an anchor, the boat listed badly when the incoming tide refloated it.
“The hull is cracked,” said Portland Harbor Master Kevin Battle. “The only thing keeping it afloat is the styrofoam in the hull.”
Battle knows all about the Eagle. He’s been trying to get its owner to take care of it for the better part of a year.
Now, out of patience and time, Battle and the local harbor commission he serves set a deadline of Sunday for the boat’s owner to claim it. If that doesn’t happen, they are planning to seize and scrap the vessel.
The Eagle is just one of a growing number of derelict boats left to rot in Portland Harbor every year. While it used to be a rare occurrence, Battle blames the uptick on two things: many people buying their first boats during the pandemic, not understanding how much it costs to maintain them, and working-class residents making a go of living on used-up boats after getting squeezed out of southern Maine’s expensive housing market.
Whatever the cause, it’s expensive to properly dispose of abandoned boats. Even for a small vessel such as the Eagle, it can run well over $3,000 to tow it to a dock, transport it to a disposal facility and scrap it.
The high price is likely why people walk away from the boats in the first place. When that happens in Portland Harbor’s public waters, the costs fall on the harbor commission that’s jointly funded by Portland and South Portland.
Within Maine’s agriculture and conservation agency, the Submerged Lands Program is authorized to help with those costs. It’s funded by fees from the owners of structures on underwater public lands, such as docks, pipelines, cables and wharfs.
But there’s little money available for the work, which means the Portland Harbor Commission usually gets stuck with the bill.
“I think the office gets only minimal funding,” said Assistant Harbor Master Maya Howard.
John Noll, director of the Submerged Lands Program, confirmed this.
“That’s exactly the case,” he said, “and we’re not obligated to remove other people’s trash from Maine waters.” After administrative costs, Noll estimated his office only has about $800,000 to work with. “Removing one 60- or 70-foot boat in 30 feet of water could wipe out our whole budget,” he said.
Instead, the program spends most of its money on lake and ocean access facilities, including public ramps and docks. This year, some of the cash is going to rebuild storm-damaged infrastructure on state land at Pemaquid Point and Popham Beach. Noll’s office also provides money to the recreational Maine Island Trail system and a shellfish monitoring program.
In Portland Harbor, the Eagle’s saga started last spring, when its owner was asked to leave a local marina. The owner then began moving it and a larger cabin cruiser, the M/V Harper’s Ferry, to various other places.
“First, he went to the public docks — under the bridge in South Portland, at the State Pier in Portland — and outstayed his welcome at all of them,” Battle said. “Then he jumped someone’s mooring off the East End beach.”
By then living on the Harper’s Ferry, the owner began anchoring both vessels around Portland Harbor. It’s not illegal to live on an anchored boat in the harbor, so long as you move it every 10 days and properly dispose of sewage and trash.
But he repeatedly failed to move his boats in time and, after a number of warnings from Battle, vanished late last year. Now, if he hasn’t paid all his fines and taken care of the boats by Sunday, they’ll end up in a landfill.
Battle dealt with a total of four derelict boats last year, and he’s already aware of a new one this year. But the real number in the harbor is impossible to come by, Battle said, as he only deals with those left in public waters. He knows of many more abandoned at local marinas and wharfs.
No Portland Harbor marina contacted for this report was willing to publicly say how many abandoned boats they deal with. However, one marina representative acknowledged it happens and said his outfit treats derelict boats like abandoned storage units, taking legal ownership of vessels and their contents, then selling them to recoup costs.
In one case, Battle said, an owner was living on his boat last year but barred from accessing it via the Portland wharf where it was tied up, because he was in arrears on his slip payments.
“So he started getting to it from the water side in a skiff,” Battle said, “because if he set foot on the wharf, he’d be hit with a criminal trespass charge.”
The owner eventually abandoned the boat, and the wharf had to dispose of it.
“There was another one abandoned at the Fish Pier, and they had to deal with it,” Battle said. “This rarely happened before the pandemic.”
Akin to the problem of post-COVID shelter dogs ending back up at the pound, Battle said a combination of federal pandemic relief money, spare time and a desire to be outdoors led to a wave of first-time boat-buying. Later, when the warm weather ran out, owners faced high winter storage costs, and more than a few walked away from their floating money pits.
Battle has also seen people moving onto cheap boats as an alternative to tent encampments or a car. Often, an owner is all too happy to sell a ratty, older boat to someone on the cheap, rather than pay thousands to have it scrapped.
“Then people try and live aboard these boats, which often have no working motors and barely float,” Battle said. “Then, what do you do to stay warm in the winter, or for sewage or trash?”
Noll thinks Maine’s abandoned boat problem could be solved if state lawmakers would require title and insurance regulations, along with mandatory seaworthiness inspections, for older craft.
“That would help prevent people from buying boats with no money or means to take care of them,” he said.
Until such requirements get implemented, harbor masters like Battle will have to solve the problem locally, case-by-case.
Battle’s assistant, Howard, reckons the expensive problem of abandoned boats will be a lively topic of debate at an upcoming training session in Castine for harbor masters.
“People will ask, ‘Where do you get funding?’” Howard said. “And we’ll say, ‘We don’t.’”
