Every once in a while, it feels like the universe is folding onto itself a little bit, as in this story where FAIL meets BOATS:

Boat owners are abandoning ship.

Gary Santos, a Mount Pleasant, S.C., councilman, checks a state notice on a forsaken sailboat.

They often sandpaper over the names and file off the registry numbers, doing their best to render the boats, and themselves, untraceable. Then they casually ditch the vessels in the middle of busy harbors, beach them at low tide on the banks of creeks or occasionally scuttle them outright.

The bad economy is creating a flotilla of forsaken boats. While there is no national census of abandoned boats, officials in coastal states are worried the problem will only grow worse as unemployment and financial stress continue to rise. Several states are even drafting laws against derelicts and say they are aggressively starting to pursue delinquent owners.

In some cases, it’s insurance fraud as a motivation; in other cases, it’s the inability to pay for repairs, docking and maintenance. They say the two happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day (s)he buys a boat and the day (s)he sells it… should we amend the quip to include the “day you drill a hole in its hull and leave it to sink like Lindsay Lohan’s career?”

And, in other boating news, we’ve learned that two of Madoff’s boats have been seized by US marshals – a yacht, and a smaller vessel. The yacht is named “Bull” – so, yeah, we’ve got our guesses as to what the other one is named.