If the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission hadn’t gotten involved, nobody would ever have believed this story.
It started way up the Eastern Seaboard in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, about 1,000 miles away from the Sunshine State. A boat owner got to his marina, stepped aboard his boat and saw that the table was missing in his cockpit. He soon realized that thieves not only had unbolted and made off with the table, but they also had taken about $30,000 of other gear, including an anchor, a bow thruster and an underwater drone.
According to the Florida agency, the boater then started walking around his marina—and found his cockpit table on the dock along with a pile of canvas near where a 50-foot sailboat had previously been docked. He called the local police, filed a report and took an educated guess that the boat would be heading south, given that it was wintertime.
A thousand miles later in Jupiter, Florida, he headed ashore to report the crime and ask for help keeping an eye out for the sailboat. He spotted a Florida Fish and Wildlife officer on the dock, and was standing with him, explaining the situation, when the sailboat happened to cruise past them on the Intracoastal Waterway. Yes, really. Florida Fish and Wildlife officers took over from there, got aboard the sailboat, verified the ownership of the stolen items using photographs and serial numbers, and confiscated them for the boat owner from Maryland.
The story is a humdinger, for sure. “What a case!” as Florida Fish and Wildlife put it online. But it’s also an example of an all-too-common occurrence that boat owners everywhere face, according to Brian Kane, chief technology for GOST Global. His company specializes in boat security, tracking and video surveillance products, and he says there’s been a shift in recent years when it comes to what boat thieves are after.
“They don’t steal boats as often as they used to,” Kane says. As recently as 15 years ago, his company was hearing about stolen boats nearly every other week. Nowadays, they’re hearing far more from boat owners robbed of all kinds of gear, everything from helm electronics to fishing rods to outboard-engine components. “A surprising one is engine cowlings,” Kane says, noting that inside those cowlings on modern outboards, there are valuable computer chips. “They open them up and take the engine control units.”
During its nearly 20 years in business, GOST Global has made it a priority to stop thieves from breaking into boats from the start. And should the bad guys get on board, he says, scaring them away before they take anything becomes the top priority. That’s because Kane has seen, time and time again, recorded video of thieves who get aboard boats, know they’re being watched on cameras, and simply don’t care. A camera, he says, is no longer enough to deter a thief. If no other human beings are around, and the robber is wearing a mask, he can make off with whatever he wants—even if the owner is watching the robbery happen on a remote video feed in real time.
In other cases, Kane says, he’s seen thieves return night after night to the same section of a dock, specifically to trip the alarm systems on boats one after the next. After a few nights of establishing this pattern, at least one boat owner falsely assumes that his alarm system is broken, so he turns it off. The thieves then have carte blanche to take whatever they want from that boat.
All these kinds of cases—similar to the Maryland boater’s case—have left Kane with a single overriding thought. “The idea is to stop people from breaking into the boat in the first place,” he says. Owners of boats starting at about 25 feet length overall can achieve this goal with the GOST Apparition system, he says. It’s a security-and-monitoring package that can expand to 32 different wireless zones on board, with everything from lasers across the cockpit to sensors on doors to bilge high-water alarms. “We have 20 different types of sensors that we can tie into this system,” he says. Those sensors not only can be set to alert owners and others if there’s a problem, but they also can be connected to deterrent devices such as strobe lights, sirens and fog machines. “One of our biggest clients is the sportfish market, and we have a good, better, best package with companies like Viking Yachts,” he says. “On open flybridges, they have rod storage lockers up there. That’s tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of rods. We arm that so it has strobes and alarms.”
And the problem, he said in early March, is not limited to the Eastern Seaboard. “I was just on a call yesterday with a dealer on the West Coast, and they’re starting to see more theft in California,” Kane says, adding that boat owners of all kinds are now taking steps to try and scare off criminals before a theft happens. “Even the professional distributors, the guys who distribute marine electronics, they’ve had their facilities broken into.” —Kim Kavin
This article was originally published in the May 2023 issue.
