Commentary : South Bay Boat People Fight for Right to Live Afloat

Not far from my home in Coronado is one of San Diego County’s most unusual residential communities: Emory Cove, a small indentation in south San Diego Bay between Coronado and Imperial Beach.

In most respects, its residents differ little from their counterparts in El Cajon, Del Mar or Escondido. They pay taxes, work at 9-to-5 jobs, vote, fret over inflation, send their kids to school, shop at the same supermarket where I shop. But there’s one big difference. Emory Cove’s 60 or so citizens don’t live in houses, apartments, condos, mobile homes or even tents. They live aboard boats.

Altogether, an estimated 65,000 Americans live on the water (about 700 in San Diego), either in full-service marinas or, like the self-named “Mud-Ducks” of Emory Cove, “swinging on the hook” in anchorages without electricity, water supply, mail delivery, telephones or other shoreside amenities. Called “liveaboards,” their dwellings range from cramped, cockleshell sailboats whose owners make do with old-fashioned iceboxes and kerosene for lighting and cooking, to sumptuous mega-yachts complete with microwave ovens, deep freezes, color TV and sunken bathtubs.

Despite the differences in life styles, however, all liveaboards share one major frustration: in varying degrees, they wear the mantle of second-class citizenship.

In the mind of most landlubbers, boat living conjures up a very romantic image: golden sunsets over the water, a low-cost, free-and-easy, to-hell-with-convention life style, and, best of all, the ability to weigh anchor and sail off into the sunset when the neighbors get on the nerves.

To an extent, that image is valid. The five years that my wife, Anne, and I lived aboard our vintage, 36-foot yawl in Shelter Cove Marina on Shelter Island were among the most memorable of our married lives. Once you accept dry rot and fungus as a fact of life, once you adjust to an almost total lack of privacy, once you overcome the claustrophobia of living, eating, resting, working and sleeping in a dwelling only 36 feet long by 9 feet wide (about one-fourth the square footage found in the most modest American tract home) the advantages of the water living pile up quickly.

But what about the other side of the coin? For one thing, my liveaboard friends complain, there is little sympathy from the tax collector if you live on the water. Whether by design or accident, state and local authorities increasingly have singled out liveaboards for special taxes on boats used as homes.

California, for instance, imposes no sales tax on buying a shoreside home but it collects 7% of the purchase price of a boat, even if the vessel is to be used full-time as a residence. For a $100,000 boat (not an exorbitant price these days) that’s $7,000 the buyer must cough up that his landlubber neighbor does not. Admittedly, California does grant boat dwellers the same property tax homeowners exemption accorded land dwellers. It was only in 1981 that the Internal Revenue Service finally decided that a boat, if used as a dwelling, qualifies as a replacement residence to offset real estate capital gains profit.

The same myopia seems to apply throughout the liveaboard’s economic life. Some banks hesitate to issue boat loans if the boat is to be lived aboard, for example. Dollar for dollar, loan interest rates are generally higher for boats than for houses. Insurance costs are more, too. (“Houses can catch on fire,” an insurance broker friend reminds me, “but boats can catch on fire and sink.”)

Even more alarming to the prospective liveaboard is the impact on his legal rights. If he chooses to live afloat rather than ashore, for example, he must in effect surrender his constitutional protection against the warrantless search and seizure of his home guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. Once a boat is placed on a public waterway (as most are) it can be legally boarded without a warrant any time of the day or night by federal authorities (usually the Coast Guard) even if it is being used full-time as a home.

Over the years, the San Diego Log waterfront newspaper has been filled with horror stories of liveaboard boat owners being aroused in the wee hours by uniformed feds and having their vessels boarded and searched. Sometimes, the stated purpose is a serious one, such as suspected drugs. But, occasionally, it’s nothing more than a routine check of required safety equipment.

But to many liveaboards I know, the unkindest cut of all comes not from officialdom but from their land-bound neighbors who don’t understand--or who simply cannot accept--their unconventional life style.

It’s the same feeling of resentment that was directed against the “hippie” longhairs in their communes of the ‘60s, youngsters who were simply marching to a different drummer and whose “aberration” we accept today. “If you live on a small, nondescript boat and anchor free in the bay, you’re accused of being a ‘squatter’ or a ‘freeloader,’ ” a liveaboard friend explains in exasperation. “And, if you’re living on a million-dollar yacht, you’ve got jealousy to worry about. Either way, you can’t win.” As one result, many coastal cities have banned boat living altogether.

No one knows this better than the Mud Ducks of Emory Cove. For about two years now, they have been waging a losing legal battle against the San Diego Unified Port District for the right to remain anchored where they are. The Port District has declared the anchorage illegal and wants to move the liveaboards to another anchorage in San Diego Bay, one that the Mud Ducks contend is unsafe. Harbor police cited several of the liveaboards and a local court found them guilty.

Pending appeal, however (a process that could take months or even years) the embattled Mud Ducks have refused to budge. That fact has not been lost on planners of a multimillion-dollar resort hotel whose rooms will directly face the cluster of derelict craft of which most of the Emory Cove community admittedly consists.

The Mud Ducks’ legal case is a tenuous one. Their attorney argues that the federal government, not the Port District, has administrative jurisdiction over San Diego Bay, and that Uncle Sam has permitted anchoring and living aboard almost since the turn of the century. I wouldn’t bet much money on a favorable outcome of that appeal.

But, legal semantics aside, it is not the Battle of Emory Cove alone that seems to matter here. It is the fact that it is increasingly symptomatic of legislative, economic and public pressures against those who pursue an unconventional life style all along our coasts.

Like the longhairs of the ‘60s, all the Mud Ducks plead is to be left alone, to march to that different drummer. Is that too much to ask?