£1 Boat Disposal

One of our first boat disposal missions of 2023 was to collect a dinghy from Portsmouth, and technically it only cost the owner a pound.

The GP14 dinghy has been stored for a number of years in a local cruising club. Her owner now has a second boat so this dinghy was no longer getting any attention. This meant that it had fallen into disrepair and was costing storage fees each year. The owner told us that in the last 5 years he hasn’t taken the boat out once. Which had meant that his forgotten boat had cost him wasted money into the thousands.

Our plan was just our typical dinghy collection scenario. We turned up at the club with our empty trailer and sliced the boat into two sections before loading. We then unbolted the trailer it was sat on. Hopefully we will be able to offer that to our Boat Scrapyard members for another dinghy owner to get a cheap trailer.

Interestingly the owner told us the price he paid us to collect and dispose of the boat was just a pound more than his upcoming storage fees. This means that technically it’s only costing him a pound more than it should have and his problem is gone. Lots of owners will continue to pay their storage bills without touching the boat in years.

When you add it up over the wasted years the money can be eye watering. Boatbreakers once scrapped a boat that the owner had paid £6,000 to store each year. He hadn’t been to that boat for 6 years so he was £36,000 down before he’s even considered the scrap costs. His eventual scrap bill was less than half of a year’s mooring so we helped him finally cut his losses.

But even in this case with a small GP14 dinghy the savings soon write off the upfront cost to scrap. Plus with the peace of mind of not having a boat draining your finances is invaluable.