A boat stranded along Ferry Reach is

not abandoned — and its owner has appealed for it to be left alone after it was broken into.

“Nobody abandons a $120,000 boat,” said Oluf Ingemann whose 40ft trawler was left high and dry in 2010 by Hurricane Igor.

Concerned East End residents included the vessel in a series of boats pointed out to this newspaper.

Although St George’s has many derelict boats, Mr Ingemann said his — dubbed

Song of Freedom — isn’t one of them.

“People have been breaking the locks and going through the cabins,” he said. “They tore everything up.”

The Ferry Road resident asked

The Royal Gazette to clarify that his boat, though out of the water, is not fair game.

“The hurricane put it up there and I need a tide high enough for a barge to take it down,” he said.

“It’s almost going to take another hurricane to take it back.”

Meanwhile boats that really have been abandoned in St George’s continue to trouble residents.

The East End’s derelict vessels were reported by MP Kenneth Bascome as a topic of rising concern among his constituents.

“I’ve never in my lifetime seen it this bad, and I’ve been here more than 70 years,” Kent Street resident Cyril Dowling said.

“People never used to abandon boats like that — people took pride in them. First of all, people used to make their own boats in their front yards. But if your boat sank in a storm you would try to get it out again as soon as possible. Nowadays they’re just left to rot away on their moorings.

“It makes for a very unsightly situation, especially since the beauty of the Island is what we’re trying to sell.

“What gets me mad is that the Government departments with responsibility seem like they’re just being negligent.”