This is the first of an occasional series
keeping a boat in Scotland is relatively cheap
so neglecting a boat is muchy cheaper there than it is in the South. An unloved boats a touch of melancholy to any harbour
these ones were in Stonehaven
I hate to see larger yachts left like that. Why spend all that money and then leave it to rot?
Move to it somewhere cheaper to moor or give the thing to someone that will appreciate it.
It saves spending the value of the boat in mooring fees on something you’ll never use.
From here in America, I have been shocked since I started watching KTL as to the sheer-number of dead and dying boats, yachts and workboats left abandoned at moorings, tied to crumbling piling and piers, and lying half-sunken in shallow-water along your rivers and by-ways. Here any navigable stream or river is the property of the people (read that the Guv’mint, but that’s another story) and the US Amy Corps of Engineers, the US Coast Guard, or the local authorities have been getting rather strict about policing such as “hazards to navigation”. And boat registration and State Licenses have made boat-ownership fairly traceable over the last few decades. Usually they get the owners for “pollution violations” of the Clean Water Acts, which can get quite expensive; potential fuel spills for on-board tanks, lubrication seepage, toxic corrosives from battery-banks, etc…
Plenty of dead and dying boats on the hard here in the back of boat yards and marinas, but you don’t see that many anymore a-float at a dock or at a mooring.
Are they abandoned out of lost interest? I wonder how many are due to poor health or situations where the caregivers hard-know the the boats existence and they get forgotten ’til the estate is settled. I’m involved with several antique car clubs and we’re seeing that happen more and more. The families or care-providers don’t even know what’s out in the shed — or can’t do anything about them — until the estate is settled.
Don’t get me wrong, I love old boats — especially the wood ones. It’s just that here so much of our marine and riverine history has been lost.
One reason I’m tempted in the future to attempt to do something similar here for our Delaware estuary and Chesapeake Bay. Especially the Delaware since it’s gone from an essential highway of our Colonial and Industrial eras to a “wet inconvenience” that people ignore or just want gone… About 99.99% don’t even register our creeks, canals and rivers when they cross them on bridges except to curse the traffic back-ups when necessary repairs are being made.