Decrepit boats not just an eyesore; they're downright dangerous, too

Living aboard their boats full time gives the community at the Willoughby Marina a sense of ownership over the bay.

Often, they are the first ones aware that a boat is abandoned in Willoughby Bay, and it becomes their crusade to get rid of the vessel. Group e-mails are exchanged among laptop computers from their plugged-in floating homes. Updates are posted, including attaboys when there's progress.

The Warrior has written about two watery eyesores in the past few weeks. One is a half-sunk cabin cruiser off Little Bay Avenue, visible from the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. The other is a green sailboat behind a Navy housing complex on Rippard Avenue.

Since then, the Willoughby boating community notified The Warrior of others. It was time to get a boater's-eye view of the problem.

"No one's taking ownership," boater Kathleen Redfern said. "No one's culpable."

Willoughby Bay has its share of dilapidated boats, and it's a short step from dilapidated to uninhabitable.

Boats can moor in the open water of the bay, where they can be uprooted during a storm, smash into the shore or a bridge and become not worth claiming. It's a popular option for someone who doesn't want to pay the price of having a boat salvaged.

"It's a convenient place to drop boats off with anonymity," said Don Gulliver, who lives on a boat at the marina.

It's not that abandoned boats suddenly happen, the boaters say: It's that they don't un-happen.

Certainly not fast enough.

Case in point: "It's Just a Habit," a little white sailboat, waterlogged and with a broken mast, drifting in the middle of the bay. Since it first started dragging anchor last summer, it has drifted to the Navy base on one side of Willoughby Bay and back a couple times.

"I don't understand why it's still afloat," Pam Boatwright said.

And when it sinks, it's likely no one will know where. Until somebody else's boat strikes it.

There's also a sunken cabin cruiser. (For you boaters, the GPS coordinates are: N36 degrees, 57.563 and W76 degrees, 16.735.)

During warm-weather months, boaters race around Willoughby Bay, and this sunken vessel is smack in their path. Racers took it upon themselves to mark the spot with buoys and briefly - for effect - a pirate flag.

"This is the one we're most worried about," Boatwright said.

During a tour of the bay last week, Boatwright and her friends pointed out some dilapidated boats docked behind the 700 block of W. Ocean View Ave.: an abandoned red sailboat fastened to a dock and two fishing vessels that were sunk, discovered when a boater struck them.

This issue is about far more than aesthetics.

Willoughby Bay is about 12 feet at its deepest points. When you consider the draft of many vessels, there's no room for a sunken boat.

For a cabin cruiser like Boatright's "Right Boat" - with a 4-foot keel - large swaths of the bay are off-limits.

"If a boat strikes these sunken vessels, it could put a hole in the boat," Gulliver said.

Without money dedicated to remove these vessels, officials have to get creative.

Assistant City Attorney Cynthia Hall said she made a deal to remove the sunken cabin cruiser.

By April 1, she said, the boat will be hauled off by a company as community service related to a separate criminal case she prosecuted.

The owner of the green sailboat goes to court Friday. Hall said the city is in negotiations with the owner of "Habit."

Legislators need to make funding available to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, which provides grant money to Norfolk to deal with the problem.

If that doesn't happen, the city needs to act on its own.

Just like no one wants to own a problem boat, it seems no one wants to own this issue.