Warden shares new information about abandoned boat

A week ago, I told you about a large boat that had joined the list of odd things I’ve found discarded in the woods.

This boat was dumped in the woods of Otis. Have you seen it before?  (John Holyoke|BDN)

This boat was dumped in the woods of Otis. Have you seen it before? (John Holyoke|BDN)

The boat was about 18 feet long, and it had been tucked into a turnout in woods that my buddies and I are lucky enough to hunt each year.

We regularly pack out small items we find in the woods, but over the years we’ve learned that we’re fighting an uphill battle. Unfortunately, much larger items are often discarded as well.

After finding the boat, I forwarded the information to Eric Rudolph, a Maine game warden who patrols that area. Late last week Rudolph got back to me with an update on the boat, and the effort to identify its owner.

Here’s some of what Rudolph had to say:

“This boat was dumped around the first week in June. I had been in the road system two days prior to the day I found it and it was not there then,” Rudolph wrote.”The boat has never been registered. Even running the serial number in an open-ended query it never came back to anything. We tore the boat apart looking for any possible identification and found nothing.”

But Rudolph didn’t finish his investigation there.

“I even had all four of my warden trainees this summer take their crack [at] it, searching Craigslist and doing interviews. Unfortunately we came up with nothing,” he wrote.

Rudolph said the boat was on his list of sites to target during a recent landowner relations cleanup day, but his crew of volunteers ended up spending more time than expected at another site. The boat is still on the list, though, and will be removed in the future.

Angry? Frustrated? Many of us are. And as I mentioned last week, the illegal dumping of trash on other people’s land is one of the big reasons landowners post their property and deny access to all of us.

So what do you say? Can you help? If you’ve seen this boat on any Hancock County waters over the past several years, or saw it in someone’s front yard with the word “Free” painted on the side, I’d love it if you passed the information along to me.

Send me an email at jholyoke@bangordailynews.com and I’ll see if we can discourage such behavior in the future.

 

John Holyoke

About John Holyoke

John Holyoke has been enjoying himself in Maine's great outdoors since he was a kid. Today, he's the Outdoors editor for the BDN, a job that allows him to meet up with Maine outdoors enthusiasts in their natural habitat. The stories he gathers provide fodder for his columns, and this blog.