It’s a recurring nightmare for environmentalists and government agencies: Worn down boats wash ashore in environmentally sensitive areas, with nobody to pay to clean them up.
Last Thursday at Point Conception was another such nightmare. A multi-agency crew worked tirelessly to excavate an abandoned sailboat stuck in the sand. It took hours to dislodge the boat — and dispose of all the junk and gunk that came with it.
“I pulled out an eight-gallon fuel canister,” said Harry Rabin, nonprofit Heal the Ocean’s (HTO) field and research advisor. “Wrecks like these pollute, kill everything, and release all this toxic stuff — fuel, lithium batteries — it adds up and does damage. And it keeps happening.”
In the case of the Point Conception crash site, the owner was trying to transport the boat, named The Falco, from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara County but fouled the propeller. Rabin suspects he was going to try to sell it off when he reached Santa Barbara. It was reported to the U.S. Coast Guard last month and took weeks of planning to figure out how to clean it up…