Palm Valley, FL: 34 ft Silverton 34 Off the Bottom in One Morning

Nobody expects to see a 34 ft Silverton 34 motor yacht in the water after a decade on the hard under a blue tarp roof. But the owner finally launched her, hoping to sell, and the tarp had hidden a wet deck. She went down against a canal seawall until the cabin roof barely cleared the surface.

The obstacle was size. A boat that big in a residential canal means a narrow lane, overhead lines, and a lot of water inside the hull. We split the job in two: pumps first, to drop the water level a few feet, then a full set of bags to bring her up.

It took about seven hours. Once she floated, a slow tow carried her toward Ponte Vedra, and the truck took the hull from there to our yard. A decade of leaks had rotted the deck and bulkheads, so she was dismantled and recycled. Engines, tanks, and bronze fittings went out as salvage, which closed out the sunken boat recovery.