"That's just silly," said Freedom Rocca, whose late grandfather, an indigenous Coast Miwok fisherman, was one of the boat's last owners.

She said her grandfather, Merrel Rocca Sr., sold the boat to a man who intended to restore it but eventually abandoned it on the shore. Rocca, 41, grew up in Marshall, an oyster-farming town where fishing boats were a common sight. She has long been baffled by the fame of the Point Reyes.

"Sometimes, I'll go to art galleries, and it's like, 'There it is! The boat!''' People paint it. They photograph it. ... I don't understand what the big deal is. It's a boat that's tipped on the side of the beach."

Still, she wishes she knew more about it, and about her grandfather, who died in 1989 when she was 6.

"The older I get, the cooler I think it is," Rocca said. "I'm like, you know what, that's my grandfather's boat."

Ownership of the land where the Point Reyes sits has also changed over the years, which has complicated the vessel's removal. Multiple federal and state agencies have jurisdiction in the bay and surrounding areas, and they often tussle over who is responsible for paying to clean up crashed boats and other marine junk.

In 2022, the California State Lands Commission unsuccessfully sought a $14.9-million grant from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to clean up marine debris along the coast of Sonoma and Marin counties.

The project would have funded the cleanup of hundreds of discarded tires in Marconi Cove, which lie in eelgrass beds that would otherwise serve as fish nurseries, as well as a collapsing pier in Bodega Bay. And it would have paid to remove 14 vessels — including the Point Reyes and the American Challenger, a 90-foot fishing boat that broke free in 2021 while being towed from Puget Sound, Wash., to Mexico to be scrapped. It got stuck on a rocky reef in the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary about an hour north of Inverness.

The NOAA "did not explain why our grant application was not selected," Sheri Pemberton, a spokeswoman for the lands commission, said in an email.

The American Challenger was uninsured, leaving public agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard, responsible for the multimillion-dollar salvage operation. The boat remains.

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