Fort Myers Beach buzzing about huge boat stuck on restaurant dock since Hurricane Ian

The hands on the clock hanging on the wall at Bonita Bill’s never move. They are permanently set to 5 o’clock.

Because, you know, it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere.

There’s also something else at the popular Fort Myers Beach bar and restaurant on San Carlos Island that isn’t moving.

At least not anytime soon.On Sept. 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian caused water to surge to more than 15 feet high along Fort Myers Beach, resulting in catastrophic damage for miles on the Gulf Coast from Marco Island to Cape Coral.

When the water receded, the effect on the shoreline was like draining a bathtub with toys in it. The water goes away. The toys left behind in the tub end up scattered, upside down and sideways.

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This has been the harsh reality at Fort Myers Beach — days, weeks and now more than eight months after Ian.

Boats are scattered everywhere. Shrimp boats. Sail boats. Speed boats. They are upside down. Sideways. Sunk.

One of those boats is named “Batchelor Pad.”

It’s precariously perched on a dock at the north end of Bonita Bill’s, a popular hangout for locals and tourists that, until the destructive September day, had only the magnificent Mantanzas Bridge as a breathtaking backdrop for customers.

Now, the view includes the bridge and a behemoth boat.

“Batchelor Pad” is 42 feet long, weighs 20 tons (40,000 pounds) and, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, it has not moved one inch since Ian roared ashore.

This giant Bertram Flush Deck Motor Yacht is stuck. It’s stuck in time. Just like the clock hanging on the wall inside Bonita Bill's.

The uncanny presence of the boat makes it feel like every day is Sept. 28 here. And depending on whom you talk to, that’s either a good thing or a bad thing.

How did the boat land on Bonita Bill's?

Bonita Bill’s has been a Fort Myers Beach fixture for decades. It’s located at 702 Fisherman’s Wharf and faces the Mantanzas Pass to the west, which separates San Carlos Island from Estero Island.

There are numerous docks and boat slips along the west side of the Bonita Bill’s. It’s also a marina where people live full time on their vessels.

One of the slips was occupied by “Batchelor Pad” until the afternoon of Sept. 28.

The owner of the property – the restaurant, bar and marina – is the Semmer Family. Bill Semmer bought the place in 1991 and earned a well-deserved reputation as a beloved figure in the surrounding beach community. Semmer founded and hosted the annual children’s fishing tournament at Bonita Bill’s, and he helped put on a fireworks display at the Fort Myers Beach Pier for 25 years.

One of his favorite sayings about Bonita Bill’s was, “Ain’t no place like this place so this place must be the place!”

Semmer was diagnosed with melanoma in December 2022. He died weeks later. He was 76.

Today, Semmer’s daughter, Katie Reynolds, is managing the family business along with her sister, Nikki Semmer, and brother, Billy Semmer.

One of Reynolds' first challenges has been addressing that elephant in the room or, rather, the boat in the restaurant.

When you see the boat — and you really have to see it to believe it — it’s almost as if it arrived at Bonita Bill’s like a patron arrives — sidling up to the bar and ordering a cold one.

“The first time I saw the boat was in pictures and all I kept thinking was that this looks like something out of a movie — this can’t be real — I had trouble wrapping my brain around it,” Reynolds said. “And I think like everyone else … next, I’m like how the heck did this not take out the entire place? Then I saw it in person months later and it absolutely looks like it was perfectly staged there.”

But it wasn’t staged.

It was put there by Mother Nature with some luck involved.

“Batchelor Pad” could have easily done more damage to the restaurant beyond a remarkably small indentation to what is known as the dingy dock. Before Ian, customers who came by boat to Bonita Bill’s could drop anchor in the pass and then navigate their dingy (a smaller boat) to the dock.

It’s not an option to do that now. The dock has been pushed inward and there is a fair amount of splintered wood.

And the boat? Remarkably, it doesn’t appear to have a scratch on it above the surface of the water.

“We are still working on the full assessment to the entire marina, but we plan to build everything back,” said Reynolds, 36, who took leave from her job with the Boeing company in Seattle to help the family stabilize all of its affairs after their father’s death.

“Luckily the boat came just inches from hitting the restaurant and only looks to have taken out our floating dock, a portion of fixed dock and some pilings,” she said.

Underneath “Batchelor Pad,” not visible to the naked eye, the boat has been impaled by two thick dock posts, which are what is keeping it securely in place. Initially, there was hope of an “easy” removal to avoid the cost of having a boat company do the job, which for this boat would cost approximately $42,000 ? $1,000 per foot.

Who owns the boat?

Eddie Kane, the last owner of the boat, was blunt.

“That ain’t gonna happen,” Kane said recently from Texas. “I didn’t think it was as bad as it is. I thought if I can get another boat with power to it and then a decent high tide, we could just slip it out of there.”

Kane is a long-haul trucker and formerly a commercial fisherman. He moved to Fort Myers Beach from Annapolis, Maryland, home of the U.S. Naval Academy.

“Batchelor Pad” was Kane’s full-time residence until Sept. 28. When Hurricane Ian, a powerful Category 4 storm, was raging, he was forced to abandon the vessel. With winds howling and water spraying, he jumped onto another boat nearby to save himself.

Despite his efforts to secure the boat, it broke free during the surge and high winds.

Kane said he had no other option but to evacuate. He had visions of the runaway boat slamming into the Mantanzas Bridge. He quickly found a life jacket, buckled it and didn’t look back.

As it turned out, “Batchelor Pad” only moved a short distance, ending up wedged into Bonita Bill’s dingy dock.

“I had friends whose boats sank,” Kane said. “There is a video of me jumping off my boat when it got loose. I didn’t know where it was going. If I had known where it was going, I would have stayed on.”

Kane has been back on the boat a few times since that day. He needed to retrieve personal items. He said he lost his set of pneumatic tools. On the bright side, some cherished family jewelry wasn’t lost.

“Lots of sentimental value there,” he said.

As it sits now, the boat is at such an angle, the bow pointing up toward the sky, that Kane said he had to hold on to something the entire time he was salvaging the possessions to prevent him from tumbling toward the back of the boat.

The mostly white boat with some shades of blue and black trim along its underbelly is impressive. Kane said the boat could easily accommodate eight passengers. One of its main features is a master state room. That part of the boat, in the back, is submerged in eight-feet of water.

Kane said the boat was built in 1977 and would have cost $200,000 at the time. He estimated the worth of the boat back on Sept. 28 to be “$40-50,000 probably.”

The current value of “Batchelor Pad” is the primary reason he opted to sign over ownership of the boat to FEMA in March, doing so on the last day he could file the paperwork. Given the value of the boat, paying a company more than $40,000 to remove it didn’t make financial sense to him. Kane said a crane will be needed to get the job done whether it is lifting “Bachelor Pad” onto a barge in Mantanzas Pass or onto a flatbed truck in Bonita Bill’s parking lot.

Reynolds pointed out that not too far behind where “Batchelor Pad” sits today is a 38-foot, steel tugboat. It sank. You can just see the top of the antenna sticking out of the water. The tugboat will have to be removed before “Bachelor Pad” can be dealt with. There's also a sailboat near the tugboat submerged and blocking access.

A date has not been set for the removal of those two boats, or "Batchelor Pad".

Boat removal has been a long, pain-staking process along the beach and the canals. Ian left a mess. Reynolds said many boats have already been removed from Bonita Bill’s marina. She credited her sister Nikki for managing the process between boat owners and FEMA.

What people are saying about the boat stuck at Bonita Bill's

“For me personally, I look forward to the day it goes. I feel like it will be a big breath of fresh air at Bonita Bill’s,” Reynolds said. “Each boat that is pulled out from the docks feels like a little bit of weight is taken off our shoulders. We’re a small island and the boating community is our mainstay - shrimpers, crabbers, fishermen, sailors, recreational boaters, and more - so many work and live right here on San Carlos Island and being able to bring our docks back that serve so many in this community is the goal.”

Bonita Bill’s re-opened on March 27. Bob Irwin, a restaurant employee, said people posing for pictures near or in front the boat has become popular.

“Twenty a day,” he said.

There is a rope around the boat. It keeps customers from getting too close and possibly injured if “Batchelor Pad” were to suddenly shift.

Reynolds admitted the buzz on social media about the spectacle of the boat has been good for business.

“It’s been a way to reach folks to let them know ‘Hey, we survived’ and that we are still here and open and it’s also been a way to bring in new folks to check us out and to San Carlos Island and support other local business,” she said. “We welcome anyone who wants to come check out the boat and get your picture. We don’t charge to come see it - just come on in and you can’t miss it!”

Keep it? Don’t keep it? The comments on social media represent both sides. These are some of the opinions shared in a thread about the boat in a post on the I Love Fort Myers Beach Facebook Group page:

Well, nothing says “we are here” like just carrying on regardless of mother nature.

I love the boat at Bonita Bill’s.  It’s a reminder of what Fort Myers went through and will continue to rebuild!

I like it! I wish it could be left like that. Adds character and shows grit and determination on behalf of everyone who worked so hard to get it back open.

Get rid of it now.

The boat is still on the dock unclaimed?

Can’t believe that boat is still inside that place.

“People want it to stay, but they need to understand it won’t look like that in two years,” said Chris Flanagan, who works in the kitchen at Bonita Bill’s.

Shelli Merrill was behind the bar preparing for the arriving lunch crowd at Bonita Bill's on a recent Wednesday.

“I like it there,” she said. “It’s cool. I think they should cut a hole in it and put some tables in there.”

The reality for Reynolds and others is Bonita’ Bills is not Disney World. Keeping the boat where it is for amusement purposes like taking selfies isn’t practical from a business perspective as well as obvious safety concerns.

June 1 marked the official start of the 2023 Hurricane Season. Understandably, that's on Reynolds’s mind.

Reynolds offered a powerful perspective. As much as the boat has been the “talk of the town” she said it’s a little blip in the scope of things. Many lives were lost to Hurricane Ian. For a brief time, she feared her own family members might not have survived the hurricane.

“While I grew up here, I now live in Washington State and was there for the hurricane. I lived here through Charley and was bracing myself for that level of destruction - nothing could have prepared me for what I saw on the news the next day,” Reynolds said. “The first thing I saw was Times Square wiped away - completely demolished. After I saw that I thought for sure my family was gone, that everything was gone. The majority of my family all live within a quarter mile of Times Square. I am so very fortunate that my family survived. And some days I’m still in awe that Bonita Bill’s survived. It took a beating but it’s still standing.”

The Semmer family is important, even to outside folks. More than 600 recently attended a memorial for Bill Semmer at the restaurant.

Kane, 60, has since relocated to Labelle. He now owns another boat and lives in a marina along the Caloosahatchee River, far away, he hopes, from any future storm stress. He was back on "Bachelor Pad" recently. Reynolds asked him if she could have the boat's nameplates to hang in the restaurant. Kane said he was more than happy to hand them over to her.

He still has a photo of “Batchelor Pad” on his phone. The image is a memory of what was, but also of what could have been.

“I am really lucky,” Kane said. “I lived on that boat for a year and a half, two years, It makes me sick every time I see it. You know, it’s like crying over spilled milk. Nothing you can do about it. It’s Mother Nature.”

As dramatic as the boat arriving to its current resting place was, removing it could be a spectacle as well with a certain amount of fanfare and suspense depending on how it plays out. When a date is set and the word gets out, there will no doubt be spectators, who will be there to say good-bye or good riddance to "Batchelor Pad."

One thing is for sure: “Batchelor Pad” will be gone, but never forgotten.

Just don’t mess with that clock.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: derelict boat on Fort Myers Beach a spectacle at popular bonita bill's