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For me, one of the enduring
mysteries of boating is what happens to old fiberglass boats when no one
wants them anymore. Fiberglass has been around for more than 40 years,
and a lot of boats have been built with it. Among that number are no doubt
many so deteriorated, out of date, or just plain ugly that no one wants
them. Where do they go?
Wooden boats eventually
turn into mulch, and steel boats corrode into nothingness. But fiberglass
lives forever. There aren’t any marine junkyards that I’m aware
of, probably because fiberglass boats are largely unsalvageable. A car
can be disassembled into reusable components. Indeed, most cars are largely
metal, which is easily recycled. But you can’t do anything with old
fiberglass. After its life as a boat, the stuff is as worthless as it
is eternal.
This subject came to
mind a while back while hauling a load of brush to my local transfer station.
(For the uninitiated, that’s a big building where trash is separated
into different piles to be transferred somewhere else for final disposal.
It’s used in towns that don’t have a landfill.)
While I was unloading
my truck, another pickup pulled in, towing an old 16-footer on a trailer.
It did a U-turn, then rapidly backed toward a pile of junk. When it was
a couple of feet from it, the driver slammed on the brakes, and the boat
shot neatly off the trailer and into the pile, nestled among mattresses,
bedroom furniture, and other dross. He then briskly pulled away, never
having exited the cab.
Fascinated, I walked
over to the boat. The seats were torn, the dash was stripped of instruments,
the windshield was broken, and it was covered in grime, but I could tell
she’d once been a pretty nice runabout. As I imagined Dad at the
helm, Mom beside him, and a couple of kids being towed behind it, I couldn’t
help but feel sad that something that had brought so much joy to its owners
had come to such an ignominious end.
I was jarred out of
my melancholy by a guy in overalls who told me to unload my brush and
get out—others were waiting. I asked him if he’d seen other
boats dropped off here, and he said yes, a few. In fact, he said, over
the years he’d seen just about everything come through here, including
the flying bridge off an old Chris-Craft.
“So what’ll
happen to this boat?” I asked, imagining it being shredded and buried
in a landfill.
“We’ll load
it on a barge with the rest of this pile, tow it out into the ocean, and
dump it,” he replied.
Was he putting me on?
She would receive a burial at sea? Okay, it made a certain kind of sense,
and it also provided a poetic epitaph. But this place couldn’t handle
anything much bigger than this boat. So what happens to all those bigger
boats that come to the end of their lives? Where do they go?
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