Sometime around Christmas the vessel pictured below broke loose from its mooring in Lynn Harbor and washed ashore near the Nahant rotary. For the first few weeks it was a curiousity. I assume other passers by expected, like I did, that the owner would be there in short order to get his boat. But time went by and there it sat. With each passing week it settled a little lower in the sand.

I’ve been told that in most US states the law is that any vessel run aground and abandoned by its owner, even if just for a short time, can be claimed by anyone with an aim to do so. Even if this is correct in practice it’s probably not that easy. There must be papers to file and legal hoops to jump through. This is, after all, America. In this particular case I suspect that the owner actually abandoned the boat even before it broke its mooring, as there’s been no attempt to retrieve it and from the day it washed up it had a look of neglect.

I stopped off to take a closer look at it a few times. And apparently I wasn’t the only one. Because even if no one is interested in the hull, for sure bit by bit scavengers have removed pieces of it: the anchor and lines; compass; deck hardware; life vests; ring buoys.  It’s reached the point where there’s not much salvageable left outside of some minor hardware.  I scraped some sand away and discovered Doel Fins on the motor. Just so happens I was planning on fitting my Wahoo! with Doel Fins this year.