Houseboat

QUESTION: I own a houseboat. Because I live on it part of the year, I have been writing off the interest payments on the loan I took out to buy the boat, just as I do on the mortgage on my house. Now, I hear that I will no longer be able to deduct the interest expense because yachts and houseboats can no longer be considered vacation homes under tax reform. I'm upset. This is a legitimate deduction, not a phony tax shelter. Do you know whether this information is accurate?--N. T.

I have an exciting handout from the San Francisco Fair announcing a Herb Caen Write-Alike Contest "as a tribute to Caen's 50 years as a San Francisco columnist." It says "the column must be approximately 980 words in length; items must be believable but need not be true, although libelous assertions against real people will not be allowed."

Dudley Lewis used wood from a rotting pier and copper fastenings from an old power line to build his seaworthy home. Lewis, a part-time writer and journeyman machinist and carpenter, lives on his boat, one in the ramshackle collection of mostly rebuilt, refurbished old boats on the Sausalito waterfront. Skimming the Bay Lewis' days are spent skimming the bay or working on his vessel, a replica of the New Jersey oyster scow that Joshua Slocum sailed around the world in 1893.

"The world's oldest houseboat": That's how De Zwerver (The Wanderer) is being described. Or: "the oldest boat in existence that was originally built to be a residence." It's for sale through Sotheby's New York real estate office at $300,000, including furnishings and delivery to any major U. S. seaport from where it is docked in the Netherlands.

Unless you fish, there's absolutely nothing to do on the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes. Nothing but laze in the sunshine, listen to the lap of sweet water under the hull, breathe air heavy with orange blossoms, and watch leggy shore birds stalk dinner in the shallows. Sunrises steal silently out of the horizon; sunsets spangle the waters with fire. To jangled Florida vacationers, it sounds like heaven.

Donna Michel first heard the mysterious sound last year as she was drifting off to sleep in a lower-level bedroom of her houseboat. The eerie humming "clicked on" in the early evening, peaked in volume around midnight, and finally went away in the morning--a pattern that would be repeated all summer. "At first I thought it was a transitory type of thing," Michel said one recent afternoon. "Then when it didn't go away, my husband and I started to ask ourselves: 'Are we going crazy?'

The San Diego Unified Port Commission on Tuesday approved a series of regulations and fees aimed at removing unseaworthy houseboats moored in the Shelter Island commercial basin areas of San Diego Bay. The 5-2 vote followed considerable opposition from houseboat owners who have taken up residence in the areas free of charge, and from South Bay officials who feared that the vessels that would be disallowed under the ordinance would be towed to Coronado or Imperial Beach for anchorage.