Scrap a Yacht News
Eastney beach is a hot spot for end-of-life and abandoned boats. Over the years the Boatbreakers team has been tasked with removing many of the boats that have been ditched on the beach by former owners.
This week the Boatbreakers team hit the road and headed for Essex to dispose of an old wooden yacht that was sitting in a couple's garden. The boat's position in the orchard area of the garden meant getting a hi-ab or any heavy lifting gear was out of the question.
At Boatbreakers we always like the change of scenery of chopping up a boat on site as they usually mean visiting an interesting place where you wouldn't expect a boat to be. Often it will be a garden and we'll hear stories of how the owner has always planned to finish the project and go sailing but one thing led to another until we arrived with a disc cutter.
The UK has endured a pretty terrible winter with plenty of rain, storms and even a beast from the east. In early April we had a call from an Insurance company that wanted us to collect a boat that one storm had gotten the better of.
Winter really is coming for Boatbreakers. With the conclusion of the Southampton Boat Show the summer season slams shut and it's now that boat owners face the decisions on what to do with their boat over the winter.
It's not an unusual sight to see boats in people's front gardens, especially on the South Coast. However, when the boat is a 37ft fin keel yacht it becomes quite an imposing landmark. The boat had been in her current position since 2006 when she was taken out of the water and onto the stand so her owner could carry out repair works to her.
The latest job for our team at Boatbreakers was an on site yacht mould disposal in Marchwood. We got the call from the owners of the mould and we arranged a site visit to gauge whether we could transport the mould to our yard or if we'd have to chop the mould on site.
Some yachts when it is time to scrap seem to put up quite a fight. These are usually made from fibreglass and it can take our skilled team of Boat breakers all day to safely chop up the boat.
It's always a shame to see boats that are left abandoned and therefore destined for the chop. With most boats that we dispose of at Boatbreakers it's usually a case of they were used extensively once but over the last few years the costs and effort needed to keep these boats going has been too much for the owners.
There's never a dull day in Boat Breaking. We remove boats from all sorts of locations from driveways to riverbeds, so when we were asked to scrap a boat that is still in the water in Portsmouth Harbour we were happy to help.
Before and after shots of a recent job we did scrapping a Wooden Yacht.
Our first scrap boat of 2016 was a 23 foot wooden Yacht that hadn't seen the water for almost 20 years. In the early nineties the boat was housed in a cradle on the owner's driveway.