Technically under Bill C-64, they would be called dilapidated. Some in fact are hanging on by a thread, so to speak.
This is a picture of the Ladysmith Community Marina. Our marina is in the front, and the town is in the back.
Here are couple of pictures just to show you what we have.
There's our welcome centre, which is federally and provincially funded.
Here's the approach from the town onto our marina.
We do a number of free festival events for communities. This was an event with marine biologists and divers bringing up specimens under a special licence, for kids to get a glimpse of what's under the water.
We run a program called Dine on the Dock, for which we bring in guest chefs to let people sample their wares. We are a non-profit society, so any money raised goes to the chefs, for example.
This was from Kids' Day. It's actually called Kids' Pirate Day, but we're looking for a new name for that. About 6,000 come down. It's a wonderful family event. Everything is free, and there's a fishing derby to help the Kinsmen.
Next door is water lot 651. This is an early morning shot I took. You can see the smoke over the water. Those are illegal wood stoves. This was about a week ago. It was a strangely cold day in British Colombia, and the wood stoves were fired up. This shows about 15% of what's there.
In this shot with the post in the middle, just at the bottom, you can see some logs in the water. That's the dividing line between our water lots. To the left is our marina, and to the right are the illegally moored boats. There are three tied together, which is typical of rafting by squatters. One will be a living quarter; one might be a sleeping quarter, and one is a storage area.
That's a 90-foot 100-tonne landing craft, a barge, on which a gentleman brings in metal vessels on a regular basis and cuts them up for salvage. Once he's done with them, they seem to disappear in the night. You can see the three rafted boats off to the left as well.
This is an example. In this particular one, there are nine boats rafted together, with two people living on them. When one sinks, they step to another. On the right-hand side, you can see a turquoise sloping vessel. It's actually just held there by the bow rope. It sank.
Here's another example of a typical live-aboard vessel by a squatter. You can see they're just getting onto their boat.
This is another typical example of three rafted together. This is the Viki Lyne II when it had 33,000 litres of oil onboard it. It took the community four years to get rid of it. The boat to the right of it burned. The one to the left of it sank about two months ago.
Here are three. You can see one in the foreground that burnt earlier in the year. One sank beside it, and there's one that's just burned behind it.
Captain Wootton said they had removed seven or so vessels over 18 months. I've seen six burn. I've had too many calls in the middle of the night. I've had too many people who have been threatened by squatters. You can imagine what this does when you have a marina full of visitors and that is what's going on next door.
So to your question, most are pleasure craft, but almost all are dilapidated. I doubt that there's a vessel or two that could safely navigate the waters.