His 'Yellow Submarine' dream sat in a swamp for decades. Why it was just hauled away.

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A Florida man's dream to build a 100-foot-long submarine has formally ended after workers hauled the giant steel tube out of a Keys mangrove swamp to be hacked up and recycled.

Known locally as the "Yellow Submarine" even though it had mostly rusted to a dirty red, the former piece of industrial equipment was the pipe dream of a Marathon resident who envisioned turning the windowless tube into an eco-tourism attraction.

But the man's efforts ran squarely into that old nautical saying: A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.

The vessel had been tucked in a canal on a tiny island called Boot Key since the late 1990s. The then-owner told a reporter in 2008 that he'd rescued the steel vessel from a Chicago scrapyard and had it barged to the Keys, where he planned to renovate it into a powered submarine. He described floating around the erstwhile vessel on a homemade raft and predicted he was close to being finished.

But 17 years later, contractors this week surrounded the rusting 100-ton tube with rigging and float bags so they could haul it ashore for recycling.

The painstaking $195,000 removal of the vessel highlights the environmental and navigational challenges posed by the thousands of other abandoned and derelict vessels around the United States, from Florida to Alaska, Minnesota and Oregon.

Florida law allows the government to seize and remove abandoned vessels, and to charge the owner for the cleanup. The 2008 news article said the then-owner discovered it would cost him $750,000 to get the vessel certified as seaworthy.

"There was basically nothing inside ‒ it's just a huge tube," said Brittany Burtner, who oversaw the vessel's Aug. 11 removal. "It was actually still floating."

'It's shocking how much of it can be recycled'

Burtner, who is Monroe County, Florida's, senior administrator for marine resources, said abandoned boats can contain everything from diesel fuel to oil and cleaning supplies that can leak into waterways when a vessel runs around or springs a leak.

Because of the ongoing legal case involving the now-removed Yellow Submarine, Burtner said she didn't have publicly available information about who currently owned the vessel or why it had been abandoned.

She said a 2021 change to Florida law allowed authorities to launch a derelict-vessel investigation after years of it sitting in the canal. Monroe County has been using a Biden-era $3 million federal grant to clean up abandoned vessels, and has already removed about 250 in the past 12 months.

"A lot of things had to happen at once, and they all came together this year," Burtner said. "Even though this thing looks like a rust bucket … it's shocking how much of it can be recycled. They're probably going to spend the next month cutting it apart."

Working to solve the problem

The federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is separately funding the removal of more than 300 abandoned and derelict vessels across six states over the next four years, both on the seacoasts and along the Great Lakes.

NOAA is providing $69 million for the work, which also includes removing abandoned fishing gear, tires and marine debris.

Burtner said people often buy cheap used boats thinking they'll renovate them, get in over their heads, and then leave them anchored in a quiet cove before boating away.

"What will be fairly common is that someone will abandon a boat and it will just sit there at anchor and just slowly fall apart," she said.

"It's really hard to tell the difference between a boat that's just sitting there and a boat that's been abandoned. It can take years. It's a difficult problem we're working to solve from many different angles."