A boat sued in court and later arrested?
Apparently.
At the beginning of last winter the owners of the Irish Piperbrought their 41-foot wooden fishing boat from Maine to Gloucester Marine Railways in Massachusetts for repair and wharfage, then vanished, never returning to claim their boat or pay for the boatyard’s services.
“They never even checked on it and never came back,” Viking Gustafson, general manager of the railways, told the Gloucester Times. “It just got dumped at the dock.”
Gustafson said the Irish Piper’s owners — listed in court documents as Keith Butterfield of New Bedford and Stephen Lozinak of Newbury — failed to respond to a litany of phone calls and correspondence seeking payment or the removal of the vessel.
So the business did what you might expect: It sued Butterfield and Lozinak in U.S. District Court in Boston for the more than $7,000 they owed for tending to the boat during the winter, including a pair of haulings to protect it from two of the season’s most severe storms.
“We had to continually check on the boat and hauled it twice because we didn’t want it to go to the bottom,” Gustafson said. “I didn’t want to go through this again this winter. Patience will out.”
