Florida’s Abandoned Boats

Captures haunting images of derelict vessels, symbolizing the broken dreams of leisure and loss.

Far and away, there are more recreational craft registered in Florida than any other single state. But for some of Florida's boat owners, life on the water is anything but a dream. Buffeted by hurricanes, swamped by the misfortunes of a distressed middle class, a surprising number of Florida's boats are derelict--adrift, submerged, or otherwise unseaworthy. They are lodged under bridges, wrapped in the arms of mangroves, slowly grinding oyster beds under their own broken keels. These are Florida's abandoned boats. While state and local governments scramble to meet the costs of salvage, thousands of foundering boats have run aground all along the expansive coastline of the Sunshine State. These wrecks aren't headline-grabbing disasters. The cheeky names scrawled on the hulls of these craft won't go down in any history book. Rather, the drama inherent in these orphaned vessels is more human in scale--the dashed wreckage of an aspirational life of leisure, unmoored and out of reach. Florida's Abandoned Boats is a dynamic photographic essay from Florida author Thomas Kenning, presenting 140 haunting portraits of these scale-model shipwrecks--a sinking vision of good times gone bad.