Insurance Firms Will Auction Off Battered Boats

Once they might have been worth $10 million or more.

Now the 68 luxury yachts, speedboats and other water craft are damaged goods. As in storm-damaged.

Windows are shattered, tops are crumpled, hulls are nicked and streaked with creosote. Interiors and wiring have been coroded by as much as two weeks in sea water from snowstorms that collapsed marina roofs in December.

Rather than pay for repairs, four insurance companies - Safeco, Allstate, Unigard and Farmers - paid their owners the estimated value and took possession.

Next Saturday they’re being sold at auction. Auctioneer Jim Quinn figures it will take about 2-1/2 minutes a boat, less than three hours in all. There are no minimum bids.

The boats were hauled by Sully Sutherlin and Tyler Timmerman, owners of Global Marine, by truck to the lot of a drywall recycling operation in this Snohomish County suburb southeast of Everett.

Peter Worthington, publisher of the monthly Nor’westing Magazine, said the boats sold for an average of $150,000 new. The biggest, a 42-footer, would have cost about $250,000, Sutherlin said.

Vern Swimm, an IBM inventory-control manager, said he accepted $31,000 from Allstate for his 28-foot boat, which was 21 years old, rather than make an estimated $28,000 in repairs it would have needed.

He figures it will bring $3,000 to $4,000 at auction.