Laurel Leff Photo
When Christopher Randall, executive director of the New Haven Land Trust, arrived Sunday afternoon at the organization’s nature preserve flush against the Long Island Sound, he expected to find raging waters and roiled vegetation.
He didn’t expect to find a 28-foot sloop tossed over 1,500 feet inland, a stone’s throw from Long Wharf Drive.
“Two bicyclists came up to me and said, ‘the boat’s pretty crazy,’” Randall (pictured) recalled of the hours in which Hurricane Irene sputtered to an end Sunday. “I didn’t know what they were talking about.”
He soon found out. Around the bend from the granite V of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, several football fields from the still churning Sound, sat a relatively unscathed sailboat.
Once he got over his surprise, Randall, who has been the land trust’s executive director since April 2010, knew he had a problem. What to do with the many-ton boat sitting on ecologically fragile wetlands?
The site, which is about 20 acres at low tide, 12 at high tide, is one of six nature preserves the non-profit land trust owns within the city of New Haven. The trust also runs the city’s community gardening program.
Being a 30-something guy, Randall immediately posted his find on Facebook. Soon thereafter reinforcements arrived in the form of his friend, Wojtek Wacowski.
“It was a classic case of social media going to work,” said Wacowski, who describes himself as a professional sailor and a “nautical crazy guy.” “We knew immediately what each other was doing because we were posting.”
And Wacowski knew what to do with the boat: turn to Connecticut General Statutes section 15 – 140c.
Steps 1 and 2
“Connecticut is unusual in having a specific procedure for dealing with abandoned boats,” said Wacowski, who lives in Fair Haven near the water.
Section 15 – 140c describes a five-step procedure for dealing with abandoned boats, defined as boats left unattended for more than 24 hours. Randall’s find may or may not have fit that definition at the time, but it was a good bet it soon would.
Step 1: Call either the local police or the State Environmental Conservation Police.
Around 5 p.m. Sunday, Randall called the local police, who probably had a few other things to do in the storm’s wake.
As Randall and Wacowski waited, they fended off what Wacowski described as as “the good old New England tradition that anything washed up on shore is loot.”
They scared away four teenagers who were trying to unscrew the boat’s hatch. They deterred a fellow who described himself as a tattoo parlor owner from West Haven and seemed to think he could lay claim to the boat.
Finally, around 11 p.m. the cops arrived. “They didn’t know what to do,” Randall recalled. “Their first reaction was “why are you calling us?”
Given that calling law enforcement was precisely what the law required, the police took down the information and filed a report.
Randall could now move on to Step 2: locating and alerting the boat’s rightful owner. A form requesting the name and address of the boat owner needed to be filed with the Department of Motor Vehicles, which keeps a registry of boat owners. Then a certified letter was to be sent to the owner, requesting that the boat owner remove the boat or sell it to the property owner, if the owner wants it. (For the record, the New Haven Land Trust does not want the boat.)
Randall didn’t have to take that step. Wacowski — who not only seems to know everything there is to know about boats, he also seems to know everyone who owns a boat — learned the name of the owner “through the grapevine.”
High And Dry
Through his own inspection and investigation, Wacowski also figured out what likely happened to the boat.
Even though the back of the boat gives her name (boats are still always girls, like hurricanes used to be) as “Abba-Gale II,” and her port as “East Lyme, CT,” Wacowski discovered that the boat had been docked at the City Point Yacht Club, a short expanse of Sound from the preserve.
According to Wacowski, the boat had been registered with the DMV but the registration hadn’t been renewed in 2011. “Judging from the look of the boat it had not used intensively this season,” Wacowski said.
Wacowski with mooring lines.
And judging from the two mooring lines that hung chafed and broken, “the boat was going up and down, up and down,” in Irene’s wake. It eventually broke lose from its moorings at City Point.
Wacowski said he didn’t know of any other boats in New Haven that became unmoored during the storm. Nor did any of the 150 boats docked with his boat in a New York marina come loose.
“Everyone was preparing for way stronger winds than there were,” he said. “With proper preparation you were okay.”
Abba-Gale II wasn’t. It skittered a mile or so on Irene’s 11-foot surges and came to rest just beneath the point that Long Wharf Drive curves around with the Sound.
Now that the boat’s in the preserve, what is the likelihood that it will head out again on its own?
“There would have to be another hurricane with wind blowing from exactly the opposite direction,” Wacowski said.
That leaves it to Randall to make sure Abba-Gale doesn’t remain in the nature preserve.
That could be a challenge.
Boat has been vandalized.
Although Randall and Wacowski headed off some early vandalism, every day more boat parts disappear. A sign someone posted in Spanish on the boat’s side, warning intruders to keep out or be prosecuted, hasn’t helped. The sails are now gone, as is the steering wheel.
A little web searching revealed that a boat with a similar make and model year (a 28-foot Ericcson built in 1982) in “pristine” condition would sell for $12,000. Far from pristine and becoming less so every day, the Abba-Gale II might fetch $8,000 to $10,000, Wacowski estimated.
That could be less than the cost of removing the boat from the nature preserve.
“It could cost thousands of dollars and the boat’s quality is deteriorating,” Wacowski said. “The cost of a salvage operation could be higher than the value of the boat.”
The area’s delicate ecosystem means the boat can’t be removed by sea. “You can’t just take equipment into a salt marsh,” Randall explained.
Cranes to remove boats would have to come in through shrubs.
Cranes from the road can’t just go in and yank the boat out either.
“I have to know it’s going to be done in an ecologically sensitive way,” Randall said. “Before I can give anyone carte blanche, I need to know a specific plan ahead of time that has the most minimal impact on the preserve as possible.”
Randall hopes he’ll have such a plan soon.
Abba-Gale’s Captain Emerges
Early Tuesday afternoon, he received a phone call from the boat’s owner, who gave her name as Margareet. “She said, ‘don’t worry, I’m going to take steps to remove the boat.’”
Reached by phone Tuesday night, Margareet said she was “already pretty devastated” by the loss of her boat and “didn’t have any comment.”
For now, Randall said he’s not worried. Nor is he contemplating the remaining statutorily mandated steps for abandoned boats if the seller doesn’t remove it: Step 3 (selling the boat), Step 4 (recouping the cost of storing the boat), or Step 5 (registering the boat as having a new owner).
“The owner is responsible for removal of this boat,” Randall said. “On the phone she seemed adamant she wanted to get it out of here.”
It remains to be seen just how she’ll do it.