The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
FORMER OWNER LEFT HOLDING BAG
Responsibility for abandoned, icebound boats sometimes floats in ‘gray area’ of ownership
A little over two months since an abandoned sailboat, once frozen fast in the Grand River, broke free of its tether and got carried into Lake Erie during a mid-January ice breakup, its fate remains uncertain.
The 26-foot sloop, named St. Nicholas, was left in the water at Riverbend Marina in Fairport Harbor Village at the end of last boating season. Despite the marina’s attempts to contact the owner, who its immediate past owner says never even registered the boat in his own name, the boat remained in the water, eventually becoming encased in ice.
Painesville Township angler Frank Zalek said he watched the vessel make its way down river and toward Lake Erie on Jan. 12, following a couple of warm days as massive chunks of river ice broke the craft free of its line.
“It was just tied up to the
wall and the ice started moving and carried it away,” he said in a Jan. 16 phone interview. “It was really something else, I tell ya.”
By then, it had made its way to the mouth of the Grand River, a few hundred yards offshore from Coast Guard Station Fairport.
An official there, reached by phone Jan. 16, said the Coast Guard didn’t have any plans to do anything with the boat because it didn’t pose any immediate threat and there was obviously no one on board who might have been in danger.
“Obviously, there are no injuries involved,” said USCG BM2 Scott Sjostrom. “Being frozen in the water like it is, it doesn’t pose any
hazard to navigation right now because there aren’t any boats coming in.”
So, he said, the plan was to wait until the ice melts and “see what happens from there, if it hasn’t sunk by then.”
By now the lake has melted - and re-frozen - at least once and, for weeks, the St. Nicholas could be seen hugging the breakwall to the east of the Fairport Harbor West Lighthouse. It eventually began to tilt and, as of March 24, the St. Nicholas can no longer be seen from shore, even with the help of binoculars.
But that doesn’t mean the story of the St. Nicholas has reached its conclusion.
According to Akron resident William Harrison, who bought the boat, himself, toward the end of the 2016 boating season, he sold it to a Cleveland-area man in the spring of 2017 after deciding
it wasn’t worth what he would have to spend in storage and dock fees for the few times he’d be able to use it.
“Basically – long story short – I was just trying to get rid of it,” Harrison said in a March 23 phone interview. “With the docking and marina fees, plus what it would cost to store it over the winter, it just wasn’t worth it to me to keep it.”
So, Williams said he sold it to the man he and the marina just can’t seem to get a hold of.
Williams said the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which has jurisdiction in cases like this, contacted him at the end of January, saying it’s now his responsibility to arrange whatever salvage operation needs to happen.
“I sold that boat to a gentleman last year (2017) and just got a call from the Ohio
DNR,” he typed in a Jan. 26 e-mail. “He never transferred the title so it’s still in my name and now I have to deal with it!”
Attempts to obtain commentary for this article from the ODNR were unsuccessful.
However, a public affairs officer from U.S. Coast Guard Sector Buffalo, which is the organization’s eastern Great Lakes area headquarters, shed some light on its role in instances of unmanned adrift and derelict vessels like the St. Nicholas.
As far as who’s responsible for the boat, Lt. jg. Kyle Maxey said “it’s a little bit of a gray area.”
“If the Coast guard, some other commercial entity or even a private mariner puts a line on it, then it kind of becomes their responsibility to tow it away,” Maxey said, adding that, barring any immediate threat to
people, commerce or the environment, the Coast Guard is reluctant to intervene so as not to interfere with commercial salvage operators’ business.
“Normally, what can be done for these types of vessels, is that we’ll put out a broadcast that there is a hazard vessel, to alert mariners in the area,” he said, adding that they would also likely put some kind of illuminated beacon on it to ensure mariners navigating the affected waterway at night could see the potential hazard.
“The biggest responsibility we’d have would be to put out that notice, which we’d broadcast over Channel 16 – the emergency hailing frequency for maritime radios,” he said. “Obviously, if it floats into the channel and people are saying ‘Hey! It’s interfering with shipping operations.’ We’d
likely intervene,” Maxey said. “But, as long as it’s not a threat to shipping operations, the public’s not in danger and the environment’s not in danger, we pretty much stay out of it to kind of make sure any kind of maritime commerce is not being interfered with.”
Unfortunately for Harrison, his contribution to maritime commerce in this situation will likely cost him more than $5,000, he said.
“It’s a 26-foot boat,” he said. “At $200 a foot, that’s $5,200 to salvage a $500 boat... But I’m going to have to get it out of the water one way or another, whether it’s in one piece or in many pieces.”
As of March 23, Harrison said he planned to make the trip to Fairport Harbor in a few weeks to try to find the St. Nicholas and decide how to proceed.