Boats are being abandoned on SC’s shores. Why? And what’s being done about them?
It’s an unusual sight. Far from any docks, or even easily accessible land for that matter, a boat is being pulled out of the Intracoastal Waterway.
The process isn’t graceful. The boat, tagged with fading spray paint, has chains wrapped around its midsection and tied to a backhoe parked on a floating barge. At one point, it seems unsure who will win the battle: the long-abandoned boat fighting to stay in the water, or the backhoe trying to yank the ship out of the saltwater.
The backhoe wins, pulling the lower half of the boat onto the barge, but it comes at a price. Pieces of wood from the boat’s hulls crack and break off, creating a mess that has to be cleaned up.
The scene was one of several on a recent October day. Black Water Dredging, conservation group Wounded Nature - Working Veterans and South Carolina’s Department of Natural Resources were working together to pull four boats out of the Intracoastal Waterway. The boats had been abandoned for months or years, and their continued existence in the water endangers both people and wildlife in the area.
In Horry County alone, there are at least 20 abandoned boats scattered around different waterways that are in various stages of DNR’s abandoned boat removal process, DNR officer Joel Chanca said. But the problem isn’t one that’s exclusive to the Myrtle Beach area; Charleston and Hilton head have also dealt with this problem, DNR says.
“We go to areas that tourists don’t go to, where the wildlife wants to be,” said Whit Jones, a member of Wounded Nature.
The cost of the effort on that day in October easily cracked $100,000, and Black Water Dredging was donating its time to help out, Jones said. But the day represented a major milestone. With the second of four boat removals that day, Wounded Nature marked its 100th abandoned boat taken out of South Carolina’s waterways.
Wounded Nature’s work began two years ago, when they started to wonder what was being done with all of the abandoned boats in the region, Jones said. “They’re everywhere. No one’s doing anything, engaging at the state level and local level.”
“At a certain point, you don’t wait to be told — you take action,” he said.
How do boats get abandoned?
The recent boat removals represent only a small part of a larger problem facing South Carolina’s waterways.
Rather frequently, boats are abandoned by their owners, left in bays, rivers and the ocean, oftentimes after having run aground or having a mechanical failure. But sometimes, the boats appear to be intentionally abandoned, usually near other abandoned boats, DNR says, creating a sight resembling an abandoned boat graveyard.
“Somebody sees one over there, so then they pull theirs there, and then you get another,” DNR Captain Michael Paul Thomas said. “As soon as we can get that cluster out, then nobody will be bringing their boats there.”
The removal process takes months. Sometimes a boat’s owner can be found. Sometimes they can’t. In the shortest possible time frame, if the owner can’t be found, it takes about 90 days for DNR to gain full approval to remove a boat from a waterway. If the owner is found, the department then begins negotiating, often with the hope that the owner will give up control of the boat.
In the case of a shrimp boat near Calabash removed last month, the owner was a military veteran who had been out on the water only to get trapped on the shore, Thomas said. The boat stuck and the owner left it there, but they relinquished control of it when DNR reached out.
Abandoned boat owners “may not have been to it in a year, but they may own it,” Thomas said. “We’re not going to snatch someone’s property without going through them full and clear process.”
Vessels can be environmental risk
Realistically, DNR could fine the owners for abandoning their boats once they identify who they are. But for the sake of expediency, the department tries to avoid doing so.
The goal, Thomas said, is to get the boats out of the water as fast as possible. Fining an owner risks dragging out that process, and the longer a boat sits in the waterway, the more it risks harming the environment or other boaters, Thomas said.
“Most of these folks don’t have the money to deal with the boat anyway, so writing a ticket, it’s really not helping the whole process,” Thomas said. “We’re worried about the safety of folks running into them or whatever, but we’re also worried about the environmental damage of them breaking down.”
The environmental risks presented by abandoned boats include chemicals from treated wood leeching into and contaminating the surrounding water. In some cases, ships with fiberglass hulls or styrofoam cores can slowly disintegrate, putting microplastics into the water that later bioaccumulate into human food supplies like shellfish.
Once DNR has approval to remove an abandoned boat, getting it out of the water can end up being much harder than getting permission to do so.
Many abandoned boats around Horry County have been sitting in the salty Intracoastal Waterway for years. The saltwater ravages the vessels, often leaving them unsalvageable, Wounded Nature representative Rudy Socha said.
“Most of the boats are 50, 60 years old, and the metal parts are pretty well corroded,” Socha said. “If the boat were in freshwater or on land and it were that old, it would be possible to go ahead and salvage parts off of it. But if it’s been in saltwater, it’s usually just total trash.”
Lack of funding requires creative solutions
Despite dozens upon dozens of boats being abandoned across South Carolina’s coast, there’s no state money to pay for their removal.
“There is not a dedicated pot of money, state or otherwise, to take care of these things,” said Thomas, the DNR captain. “Even if the owner agrees, ‘I don’t want it anymore, you guys have it,’ then there’s still the question of the equipment and manpower and all of those steps to get it out of the water. That’s an expensive and labor-intensive process.”
Each boat can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $100,000 to remove, Socha said. Factors affecting cost include the boat’s size, whether it’s trapped in a marsh and, in the case of sunken boats, if it will require a dive team.
State Sen. Greg Hembree, a Republican who represents Horry County, said abandoned boats represent a dereliction of responsibility by boat owners.
“Nobody likes a litter bug, but this is a litter bug on an atomic scale. Irresponsible is just too soft a word for it,” Hembree said. “They’re just abandoning their responsibilities and trashing the community at the same time.”
Hembree said the Legislature is only just beginning to work on plans to deal with abandoned boats. For now, he said it’s too early to talk about possibly appropriating state funds for the direct purposes of dealing with abandoned boats, though boat owners have been abandoning their vessels for countless years. He also believes that it’s possible to direct DNR to use money typically devoted to local projects or water recreation funds for the purpose of removing the vessels.
“I’m not sure we’ll have to get into a direct appropriation. Could it be that bad? I don’t know, but that’s not what was done last time,” he said.
Some places, like Charleston, Thomas said, have specifically appropriated funding to remove abandoned boats from local waterways only to have more boats appear months or years later. It’s a never-ending battle.
So far, DNR has been able to remove boats on “shoestring funding,” Hembree said. But that very limited budget has so far been heavily reliant on the generosity of boat towing companies in Horry County and the volunteer work of nonprofits rather than the government, or even boat owners, footing the bill for the high cost of the removals.
All of those options for dealing with abandoned boats are reactive. One way Hembree sees the problem being dealt with is through a program to encourage boat owners to give up their vessel preemptively, rather than abandoning them in waterways. That way, the boats are never abandoned at all.
The state or the region needs a program that says, “Don’t dump your boat, we’ll get rid of it for you,” Hembree said, adding that it could be something resembling the Horry County Solid Waste convenience centers around the region that allow customers to easily dump bulk items.
Removing boats a difficult task
Some of the boats are almost entirely underwater. The only visible piece of one near the Bucksport Marina is its mast, jutting out of the water like a knife. And it presents as much danger as a knife, Thomas says. Any boats that get too close to it could easily damage their hulls if other sharp pieces of the boat linger near the surface, unseen from above.
A boat like that one needs a professional dive team that can swim underneath it and use special devices to float it to the surface, adding to the cost of its removal, Thomas said.
Others, like a houseboat a few miles away, will have to be dismantled piece by piece while it sits there in the water. A removal like that is especially difficult because for every piece pulled out of the water, there is a risk of dozens of splinters of wood falling back into the water.
The last of the four boats Wounded Nature and Blackwater remove on that October day is a shrimp boat beached on a shore of oyster shells. After sitting there for four years, slowly being torn apart by the tides, the boat looks like a 200-year-old haunted pirate ship, not something that was abandoned just four years ago.
The shrimp boat presents one of the most challenging removals of all four taken out of the water that day in an area known as “the crossroads,” where Little River, the Calabash River and the Intracoastal Waterway all converge.
The ship is by far the most damaged by years of saltwater. Walking around it, the long-rusted out engine and vibrant red captain’s chair are visible where the outer wooden shell has disappeared. It has to be torn apart piece by piece. It’s a messy affair — shards of wood break off and fall into the water, which then have to be cleaned up themselves.
In general, shrimp boats present some of the biggest ongoing hazards to wildlife. All of the rigging that the boats need to function can entangle fish and, in particular, sea turtles and dolphins, that get too close.
By the end of the day, the shrimp boat is removed from the oyster-shell-lined beach, with only an indentation left to remind anyone that it had ever been there.
Wounded Nature’s work is ongoing. The organization removed several more boats just this week in and around the Waccamaw River near Conway.
“Visually, you wouldn’t believe how much better an area works whenever it returns to a pristine state,” Socha said. “People think it looks somewhat scenic seeing in an old boat up on the coastline. But when you remove the old boat and all old boats and it looks natural and pristine, it just looks so much better.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2021 at 12:38 PM with the headline "Boats are being abandoned on SC’s shores. Why? And what’s being done about them?."
