CUMMING — Houseboats on Lake Lanier are not a big deal. Houseboats sitting on its shoreline for years are quite another matter.

Since at least 2010, a houseboat stuck on the bank of a small lake cove near Sinclair Shores Road east of Cumming has been a nuisance for neighbors.

“The bottom line is that it’s a huge eyesore,” Gale Yarborough said. “It’s a huge piece of metal sitting in a cove, but unfortunately it’s there.”

The boat sank years ago. But urging from residents and the Lake Lanier Association, as well as a lawsuit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, have been unable to budge it.

“It has been sitting in sort of a derelict state for several years now,” said Joanna Cloud, executive director of the lake advocacy group and a Forsyth resident. “It belonged to a person that did not have a dock permit, but he had the boat back in his cove in Bald Ridge Creek.”

Yarborough’s husband, Victor, traced the problem back to the historic drought of 2007-08, which dropped the lake about 20 feet below full pool.

“When the lake went down … he didn’t move the boat, so the boat went down and was just sitting on the bottom, which was exposed because the lake was so low,” he said. “Then the lake came back up and the boat didn’t.”

After pressure from neighbors and the corps, the owner agreed to have the boat floated.

“The vendor went out there and floated it, but the property owner didn’t actually come out to pay the vendor,” Cloud said. “Once he had it floating, the vendor just left it sitting on the shoreline.”

The corps eventually filed a lawsuit against the owner to get him to pay up and remove the boat.

“My understanding is that the property owner did not have income, had very little assets,” Cloud said. “The property itself doesn’t have a dock permit — probably will never get a dock permit — and the house itself was not worth very much, so there wasn’t really a lot to leverage in this situation.”

Cloud said it was her understanding that the judge who heard the case sought a compromise.

“I think the judge thought that it is going to cost the federal government more money to incarcerate this guy than it was going to be worth,” she said. “I think the judge said, ‘We’re going to compromise here and just get what we can out of this guy.’”

Victor Yarborough said that the boat owner’s whereabouts are unknown. The man hasn’t been seen in months, and his house has been foreclosed on. Phone calls have not been returned.

“I have not heard from him since he was evicted,” Yarborough said.

According to Cloud, the owner is in violation of the law and could be prosecuted by the U.S. District Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia. But since no one has seen the owner, and he owes a relatively small amount, prosecution seems unlikely.

Cloud also noted that the corps is reluctant to spend more money on a potentially lengthy legal battle.

“This is a little bit tricky,” Cloud said. “It’s on dry land. It has a 35-foot steel hull. There’s not much of a salvage market for steel. It’s heavy and it’s hard to chop … and it’s in a location that’s hard to access.”

Calls to the corps seeking comment on the matter were not returned Friday. Numbers given by neighbors for the boat’s owner have been disconnected.

In 2012, a similar situation involving the rusted hulk of a houseboat on the lake shoreline off Lantern Lane in northeastern Forsyth resulted in a different outcome. Two scrap metal collectors ended up dismantling what remained of the boat and hauled away the parts.