Port Tack Sailboats, Inc. v. United States

ROETTGER, District Judge.

The evidence in this admiralty case presents a script that might have been penned by the most fertile mind in a creative writing class. In brief, plaintiffs, owner of a sailboat and the owner’s insurer, seek damages suffered by plaintiff’s brand-new 39-foot Mariner sailboat. The boat was stolen by an employee of the owner and the employee sailed it into the Gulfstream east of Fort Lauderdale; at some point in time he hanged himself from the mast. The boat drifted inexorably northward in the Gulfstream toward Cape Canaveral where its course crossed that of the polaris…