The first user of a boat rental service was instrumental in helping recover one of the craft after it was stolen.
By JARED GOLDBERG-LEOPOLD
Published January 11, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - She owns a new little business in the Vinoy Basin renting three cute electric boats with surrey tops. The small craft are quiet but slow.
Steal one, and don't expect to flee very far, very fast. Maximum getaway speed: 8 mph.
So on the afternoon of New Year's Eve when business owner Nancy Frainetti hurt her eye and went to the hospital, she didn't think twice about leaving her little fleet untended. She hadn't worried about insuring the boats for theft.
"I thought, I'm just starting, at the worst-case scenario (the boats) would get damaged by scratches," Frainetti said of her Solar Surrey Boat Rentals. "I never thought they'd be stolen."
But when she returned from the hospital, she discovered that one-third of her business capital - a $27,000 Duffy Electric Boat - had gently hummed off across the waves. A witness reported that a man had boarded a boat and yelled in a foreign language when she tried to ask the man if he was an employee.
"No one really paid attention to it, because they thought it was a rental," Frainetti said.
She called the police. There wasn't much they could do.
Enter St. Petersburg resident Steve Bush, who was Frainetti's first customer when she opened her business in November. He had come back to rent one on New Year's Eve, and Holmes told him of the theft.
"I thought, "Jeez, if I've got a little business, what would it be like for me to lose one-third of my business?"' Bush said. He owns an ultralight plane, which he built four years ago and stores at Albert Whitted Airport. He decided on a little impromptu search and rescue of the wayward boat.
"I thought, "Well, shoot, I'm going to go find it,"' said Bush, who is 54. "I knew that it's unusual looking - I'd be able to spot it from the air."
Bush, who has flown for more then 30 years, took off the next day and turned his hobby into philanthropy.
"I fly around every weekend anyway," he reasoned. "Might as well have a mission."
He combed Tampa Bay in his low-flying experimental craft. In the mangroves of Hillsborough County's Cockroach Bay, he found his prize.
Locating the boat, Bush flew back to the airport and called the Coast Guard. He took off again and buzzed around the spot to guide them in.
A man was found drifting on board.
The thief "couldn't have been too smart because there was an airplane circling over them for half an hour," said Bush, who had no trouble finding the boat from the air because of its unique design, including a surrey top.
Police arrested Tam Ngoc Nguyen, 47, of the 1000 block of Sixth Street N. Nguyen, who was being held at Hillsborough's Orient Road Jail on $1,000 bail, was charged with grand theft, said Debbie Carter, a spokeswoman for the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.
With her boyfriend's boat, Frainetti towed the electric boat home. Once again, it's available to rent for $65 an hour for up to 10 people.
Frainetti, one of the first Florida representatives of the Duffy Electric Boat brand, said fewer than 20 similar boats exist in the Tampa Bay area. She said families have enjoyed renting her boats because they are easy to ride and don't produce fumes.
"I can only sell something that I really believe in," Frainetti said. "I believe this is environmentally friendly."
Bush, the ultralight pilot, is a business owner himself. He runs Rocketscience, a St. Petersburg cabinet shop and understands owner-customer relations.
"I feel sort of honored by being the first customer of her new business," Bush said. "I have a certain customer responsibility."
