The Boat Dilemma
District Game Warden Sam Feldmann
May is usually the beginning of the boating season.
One early May afternoon, I received a call from another warden about a small boat that had been located on a small lake and appeared to have gone over the spillway.
We could not determine whether anyone was on the boat or had gone over the spillway with it.
I was sent pictures of the boat but was unable to determine the owner from the visible registration numbers.
I unfortunately was far away and would take awhile to respond, so I contacted another, closer warden who could respond and determine if anyone was on the boat and try to locate an owner.
The responding warden called back a short while later and informed me that there was no one on the boat. It was abandoned.
He found the name associated with the expired registration, but they did not answer when he attempted to contact them.
A few days later a neighboring warden called, and we discussed what to do about the boat.
He had managed to contact the individual listed on the expired registration. They stated the boat had been sold a while back and they did not remember who they sold it to.
We needed to get the boat removed as it was a safety hazard and on the management area.
We made a plan to remove the boat the next day.
When I arrived at the spillway, the other warden had put sandbags along the top of the spillway to slow the flow of water. Slowing the water was necessary to allow us to get to the boat which had filled with water.
With the sandbags in place, the other officer put on waders and a life jacket and tied a safety line to the truck.
He proceeded to enter the spillway and drain the small boat of all water.
We determined the best way to get the boat out was to tie a rope to the bow eye and push it down the other half of the spillway to the creek as it would be easier to recover from that point.
A rope was tied to the boat with a life jacket attached to the opposite end of the rope.
This made it so the rope's loose end would float and be easy to retrieve once the boat was at the bottom of the spillway, which would allow us to pull the boat from there to the creek.
We then attempted to push the boat towards the creek, but it got hung up on the concrete about halfway down the spillway.
The warden in the spillway pushing the boat came out of the water, and we decided to try using a fishing pole with a large daredevil tied on to the hook to snag the life jacket and pull the boat to the creek.
To our amazement it worked. The boat was in the creek floating, and we could easily remove it.
We used a winch in our truck to pull the boat from the creek onto dry land.
We now needed to determine how we were going to transport the boat to a secure location until we could determine an owner.
We thought about it for a bit and decided to load it into the bed of one of our trucks. We used the winch and multiple straps to hold it in the truck as we didn’t have a long distance go.
Thank you to Todd Weber for the use of sandbags to stop the water from filling the boat while it was removed.
