Denmark clears out its dead boats

Almost every harbour has one: a boat nobody has moved for years, green cover, flat fenders. In Denmark they are called døde både, dead boats. They occupy berths that have waiting lists, which is what finally turned them into a policy question.

The Danish transport authority has given harbour administrations new powers for these cases. If a harbour establishes that a boat is no longer seaworthy, the owner has fourteen days to respond with a concrete plan of action. If he does not, the boat may be broken up by official order. In Helsingør, where the push for the rule came from, around ten berths are affected to begin with.

The rule applies to boats in Danish harbours regardless of where the owner lives. Anyone who keeps a boat in Denmark and visits it rarely should know that a letter from the harbour now starts a clock. The response has to name concrete steps, not simply an intention to deal with it later.

That matters to foreign owners in particular. Denmark is a common summer and winter base for German, Dutch and British boats. A fourteen day deadline is short when the post is going to an address several hundred miles away.