JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The owner of St. Johns River Taxi said the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is trying to figure out how one of her riverfront taxi pontoon boats managed to travel 3 miles down the St. Johns River early Tuesday morning.
“This morning, we were doing a school tour, got out to the docks at 8.30 this morning, the dock is behind the Double Tree Hotel on the Southbank. One of our boats was missing,” Heather Surface, owner of St. Johns River Taxi, said.
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Surface said she got a call from someone who lives in Arlington, saying they thought they saw her River Taxi pinned up against a dock.
She said the boat crossed under the Hart Bridge, the Matthews Bridge, passed Exchange Island, finally coming to a rest on the Eastbank of the St. Johns River near Arlington Marina.
So how did the river taxi get from Downtown to the Arlington Marina?
“We believe someone untied the boat,” Surface said. “It was tied up four ways, four different cleats, and the boat drifted all the way down toward Arlington Marina.”
Surface said this is not the first time this has happened to one of her boats this year.
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“At first we thought that the boat had been stolen,” Surface said. “But we’ve had issues over the past two or three months with petty crime and some vandalism on the docks and on the boats downtown.”
Jim Suber is the city of Jacksonville’s Dockmaster. He said they’ve had issues like this in the past.
“We’ve had boats get untied by people that are walking up and down the docks before,” Suber said.
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We asked him if additional security measures might prevent this in the future. He said they are going to evaluate this issue once the investigation is complete and go from there.
“All we can do is notify JSO that we’re having this issue and ask them to pay a little more attention to the opportunities that are out there and try to do some enforcement with, you know, finding out individuals that may be, you know lurking in the night, if you will,” Suber said.
Surface plans to get the water taxi back Downtown when it’s high tide.
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