Snow Hill nearing sale for Black Eyed Susan riverboat

By Jack Chavez Staff Writer

(July 20, 2023) The Town of Snow Hill is finally poised to say goodbye to the beleaguered Black Eyed Susan riverboat.

On Tuesday, Snow Hill town manager Rick Pollitt said that the town has lined up a buyer for the woebegone watercraft that the town a year ago pinned its hopes on to be its marquee tourism attraction.

The mechanical issues that doomed the endeavor were only part of the obstacle to finally selling the 149-passenger, 111foot paddlewheel boat.

The town borrowed $400,000 from the county to make the purchase, and $100,000 of that came from a repurposed state grant to the county, meaning the county first needed to determine if the state would require repayment of that funding.

Pollitt said that, to his knowledge, the state will not pursue collection.

And still, the town will have to figure out how to repay the county for the rest of that loan, considering that the final sale price will be “nowhere near” the $324,900 that the town paid for the boat itself in 2020.

“The boat will be gone [soon] but we will be paying for it for another 12 years maybe,” Pollitt said.

The $400,000 also helped with repairs that the town needed to make that it was aware of at the time of purchase.

It didn’t take its maiden voyage until late summer 2021. At that point, it looked like smooth sailing ahead and the private operator for the vessel began booking trips into 2022.

But the good times quickly ran aground in spring 2022 when a mandatory U.S. Coast Guard inspection uncovered $600,000 of work that needed to be done to make the riverboat legally qualified as a passenger vessel.

On top of the repairs and inspections the town had already dealt with from the time it purchased the boat to its maiden voyage nearly 10 months later, the latest bill proved to be the Black Eyed Susan’s iceberg in the dead of night.

Details about the buyer the town has lined up are scarce at this stage, but Pollitt said he is under the impression that the buyer is not interested in using the Black Eyed Susan as a “working boat.”

“Frankly, I think the cost of bringing it up to the Coast Guard’s standards is prohibitive to anyone who wants to buy it,” he said.

There were rumblings about possible efforts to sell the riverboat to a local buyer or group who could, in theory, keep the boat local, but Pollitt said no one was able to come up with the financing to make such a deal feasible.

“We had to tow it back to Snow Hill from (the Coast Guard shipyard in) Norfolk because we couldn’t afford the seaworthy repairs,” Pollitt pointed out. “Anyone will have to spend some money just to get it down the river to wherever (and) no one has come up with a workable finance plan.”

Pollitt said the county communicated to him that they hope to have their dealings with the state settled by the end of next week, making him hopeful that the issue can be brought to the commissioners by their next meeting on Aug. 1.