There are probably a dozen abandoned boats on Cortes Island right now, and Dominic dos Santos would like to have them towed away.

“A lot of them are floating. Some of them just have no names on them. People just leave them there. it’s just been 15 years of ‘not my problem.’  We have fiberglass shards on every beach now because they abandon the boats and let ’em get destroyed on the rocks . All this stuff is gonna wind up on the beach in the next five, 10 years?” he said.

“Let’s get them off the island while I have someone that is willing to take any boat that we can give them. They’re going all the way to Victoria.  Brittany and her partner  from Victoria are willing to take any boat that we can give them. I arranged the date, which was before the 30th.”

“All the harbours are full of crap boats. It’s gotta be like at least five or six boats that can be removed from the Gorge.  There’s the two at Squirrel Cove, that concrete boat at Mansons, and I just brought two from Cortes Bay.”

Cortes Harbourmaster Jenny Hartwick could only speak about the abandoned boats within the Harbour Authority area, but there are more in Squirrel Cove than dos Santos was aware of.  

“There’s actually three vessels that are sitting on the beach in front of the Squirrel Cove dock. All three have been surveyed by the Coast Guard within the last month and the process has been started to have them removed.The Coast Guard also assisted in the removal of  Emily, which was the fish boat that went down on the buoy that was located outside of the Squirrel Cove government dock lease area. They are also currently looking into one of the boats that’s sitting at the Squirrel Cove dock as well,” she explained.

Dominic dos Santos said, “People have been trying to give me the boats in Squirrel Cove. I’d love to take ’em.  I need written permission, or  can’t do it.  If I got the paperwork for those it would have been today.” 

Harbourmaster Jenny Hartwick has not met do Santos and was not previously aware of his initiative, but is concerned about the situation he is dealing with. 

“Unfortunately, the number of abandoned vessels is growing, and that’s not just for Cortes Island, It’s up and down the whole coast.”

So far, dos Santos has only obtained the paperwork for two boats, which he moved from Cortes Bay to Gorge Harbour. 

“I paid a dollar for each boat. I got the paperwork, I got ’em all signed over to me. They’re my liability.”

He has received a number of complaints since they arrived in the Gorge.

“I’m just more surprised at the negativity surrounding what I thought would be a positive activity. My phone keeps going. If that’s the case, I’ll just do it on my own. It’s a problem that I could fix and in the meantime I can grab a couple of anchors, or maybe a tube. This and that, some extra parts.” 

“From my perspective, I’m doing  a local resident who’s been here for a while, a huge favor.  If anything happens, he doesn’t have to worry about it. Then also cleaning up Cortes Bay. I paid $250 to get a move to the Gorge, they’re going to pay me $200 for both boats.” 

“I would love just a little bit of support from the community, if they want to help me tow a boat. It would seem that it would make more sense for more than zero people to step up and say, ‘Hey, let’s get these boats off the island before they sink and  go up on the beach and ruin oyster leases.’” 

As dos Santos puts it, the two boats he currently has in the Gorge will ‘get Frankensteined’ after they reach Victoria. 

“Brittany and her partner have a huge plot of land. They get all the boats together and they piece ’em together. They make something livable and then they sell it cheap for people that need a cheap house. It’s kind of like a trailer park.”

“We want to put people in them to live. The whole idea is to get someone in a house that may not be in a house this winter. It’s cold. I don’t want people to be cold. So that’s literally what it comes down to.”

“They’d take all the crap boats that I give them and they make a couple of good ones. They scrap the rest. They make a little bit of profit, I guess at the end of the day. Like the bayliner over here that’s getting towed off for free,  I’m getting rid of it for free. It’s worth $20,000 . The other one’s got almost working Ford V8 in it, Working home hydraulics. You could scrap those boats off and sell parts of them for a lot of money.” 

“They’re gonna make sure that if the boats go back in the water, they don’t leak, they have proper electronics and stuff like that. They will be totally usable.” 

Prior to this, dos Santos has fixed up a number of old boats himself. He has sold boats for less than what he believed they were worth, and some for less than what he paid for them.

“Like my old sailboat from 1929, I could have got 15 grand for it. I sold it to a guy for $3,500 and it made me $500. But now he and his girlfriend have a working boat with a working heater, working electricity, and I gave him a $2,400 generator for free so he can like not be uncomfortable for the winter time.” 

“I got a sailboat right beside me that I bought for $3,200 and then someone was saying, ‘Hey, I need a boat for a house’ and I quoted them a thousand dollars less than what I paid for it.”

A fairly well known Cortes Island resident, whose name I am not going to mention, also bought a boat for $500 less than the purchase price and is making monthly payments for it.  

“I will continue to find people warm and safe places to live if they need warm and safe places to be.  To **** with the naysayers if they’re going to sit comfortably and look down on people trying to not be cold this winter time. I’m not the one that needs the attitude adjustment, right?”

According to BC Housing, at least 23,000 British Columbians experienced homelessness for some period of time in 2019.

One of the Cortes Island respondents to the Electoral Areas Housing Needs Report wrote, “There is a HUGE lack of affordable housing on Cortes. People are in constant search of a place to live; some are elderly, many are young. People live in cars, vans, tents, derelict boats. People request a place to bring a trailer, or a trailerable home.”

”Top image credit: Looking out from the three abandoned vessels on the beach at Squirrel Cove towards the dock – Photo by Roy L Hales . Sound effects in podcast: morse code for ‘Cortes Currents’ and ‘It goes beep beep’ by thisusernameis @ freesound.org

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