Removal of Abandoned Tugboat Stalled

The Donny S tugboat, abandoned in Baileys Harbor for about a year now, was built in Texas in 1950 and retired from service in the late 2010s after a long career on the Great Lakes, according to a Great Lakes tugs and workboats database that contains the boat’s history. She was sold in 2021 and towed to Baileys Harbor, according to that history, where she was expected to be scrapped – and where she remains. Photo by Rachel Lukas.

Though it was supposed to be removed on Dec. 4, an abandoned tugboat remains a fixture on the water near Baileys Harbor Yacht Club. 

The 143-foot-long Donny S has been moored in Baileys Harbor for over a year, according to Mike Kahr, who owns property nearby. Kahr has watched the boat being battered by storms and was concerned it would eventually end up as wreckage on the beach. 

“It’s not a question of if, but when, it ends up scattered on the beach,” said Kahr, who has contacted the Coast Guard and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to try to have the boat removed. 

Even if the boat remained in the water, DNR conservation warden Mike Neal said it could present an environmental hazard. As boats deteriorate, they may leak fuels or other hazardous materials into the water. They also obstruct navigation. That’s why state statutes prohibit abandoning watercraft.

“It’s like leaving a wrecked car alongside the road,” Neal said.

Removing this boat proved more difficult than simply towing an abandoned car. The DNR gave the owner a series of deadlines. None of those were met, so the DNR issued citations for obstruction of navigable waterways to push the issue. Those were supposed to lead to the most recent date for removal, Dec. 4, which didn’t happen.

The boat is a hull with no engine, so it will have to be towed, according to Neal. To tow an abandoned boat, the U.S. Coast Guard has to issue a towing plan, do an inspection to determine possible environmental hazards and have five licensed people on the vessel before the boat can be removed.

Neal said he did not know why the boat wasn’t removed as planned on Dec. 4. The Pulse reached out to the Coast Guard to learn the status of the towing plan but did not hear back by deadline. Neither is the name of the owner known – Neal said he could not divulge the name and the Pulse is awaiting word from Madison. 

The owner of the boat is a Baileys Harbor resident, Neal said, but it took him awhile to trace the ownership. The vessel is a federally-documented boat, so the Coast Guard — not the state of Wisconsin — deals with its registration. Neal ran the boat’s numbers in the Coast Guard’s system and found that the boat changed ownership several times. Because of that, Neal spent around four months contacting people throughout the country to try to figure out the boat’s current owner.

“It comes back to this entity in Ohio,” Neal said. “You call that company, they say, ‘no, we sold it.’ You’re just chasing dead ends all the time.”

Neal speculated that the owner abandoned the boat after learning the process of disassembling it for scrap steel would be more involved than anticipated.

“I’m assuming at some point, they just got to a point where it was no longer cost-effective for them to try and [scrap] it,” Neal said.