Break Up of DV North Pacific Pending

Visitors to the Homer Boat Harbor will have a new landmark to guide them this summer. The rusting hull of the former fishing vessel North Pacific is aground near the west-end launch ramps, awaiting dismantling.
    Homer Councilmember Heath Smith asked City Manager Rob Dumouchel about the boat’s situation at last week’s city council meeting.
     “I still see that derelict vessel sitting on the beach out on the spit. Is it going anywhere, because it’s been there a while,” Smith asked. … “The derelict vessel will be there for some time. It’d going to be there for the summer and dismantled,” Dumouchel said.
    Dumouchel added that the method salvagers used to ground vessels reached its limit in rolling the North Pacific ashore.
    “The one thing that is a little different than what you might have expected is where it landed. We meant to move it a little further, but the size and the weight of the vessel began to exceed the air-bag movement mechanism,” he said. “So that was the safest place to stop and disengage.”
    After fishing, the North Pacific later saw life in gold dredging. The city declared the vessel a nuisance in 2016, and its owners stopped paying moorage fees in 2018. It was removed from the water in March at the direction of the city council.