For more than four years, a 180-foot, steel-hulled ship — piled high with rusting appliances, salvaged items, wood scraps and junk — has been illegally moored off the eastern flank of Maury Island.

The Cactus, a former U.S. Coast Guard buoy tender, is tied to pilings near a pier owned by Glacier Northwest, just off-shore from the corporation’s gravel-mining site and in waters officially sanctioned as a state aquatic reserve. The derelict vessel, as it’s officially dubbed, is more than an eyesore; it’s also shading out light-dependent eelgrass beds, considered vital to the health of Puget Sound.

But despite the efforts of several entities — including the Coast Guard, the state, King County and Glacier — the vessel continues to be moored illegally, a veritable floating junkyard in one of the state’s few aquatic reserves.

“We’ve hired a marine attorney to work with us on this. The sheriff’s department’s been out there. The Coast Guard has boarded it. Everyone’s looking for a way to get rid of this thing,” said Pete Stoltz, the permit coordinator for Glacier. “But it takes a lot of resources to tow one of these vessels. It seems easy. But apparently it’s not.”

Abandoned or neglected vessels — sailboats, barges, motor boats and even former military vessels — dot the region’s inland waters, illegally tied to old piers, aging buoys, bulkheads and trestles. They sometimes leak oil. They often sink. They create eyesores, navigational hazards and ecological problems.

According to several observers, the problem is particularly severe in Quartermaster Harbor, where waterfront residents occasionally try to rescue boats at risk of sinking. Last summer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) surveyed Quartermaster and found seven sunken vessels littering the harbor’s floor.

In recent years, the state has begun to address the problem, creating — by way of legislation passed in 2003 — a derelict vessel removal program charged with ranking the vessels in need of removal and working with local agencies to either get owners to take care of the boats or pull them onshore to be dismantled.

But even with that, hurdles get in the way, state officials say. It’s difficult, for instance, to simply find a place to dismantle some of the boats.

“There’s no facility dedicated to ship-breaking on the West Coast,” said Melissa Montgomery, who coordinates the state’s derelict vessel removal program, housed in the Department of Natural Resources. “Basically, we need to find a shipyard interested in conducting a recycling operation.”

Many, from environmentalists to marina owners, are frustrated with the growing problem. And while they’re glad the state has begun the hard work of forcing the boats’ removal, more, they say, needs to be done.

“I really find it hard to believe that this goes on,” said Larry Crockett, executive director of the Port of Port Townsend and chair of the Washington Public Port Association’s marina committee. “We’re so focused on protecting the environment in every other way. But when it comes to this sort of thing, it’s sort of like the Wild West.”

The Cactus is a case in point.

The ship was built in 1941 in Duluth, Minn., the first of 39 seagoing buoy tenders made in the 1940s and used extensively during World War II. A tough ship, it was built not only to service navigational aids but also to have icebreaking capabilities. It had a 30,000-gallon fuel capacity that gave it a range of 12,000 miles and, during the war years, carried deck-mounted guns and depth charge racks that supported its military duty.

The Cactus served the Coast Guard for many years until it was decommissioned in November 1971 after running aground, according to Wikipedia. It was sold two years later.

Its history after that is sketchy until it appeared in Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway in 1988 — minus an engine and apparently in bad shape, according to stories published in The News Tribune. The owner, David Thomsen, would visit it occasionally and sometimes apparently lived there, but the ship never budged, and it slowly took on more and more stuff. The News Tribune called it a “floating salvage yard.”

In October 2003, the city of Tacoma, armed with the state’s new derelict vessel law, posted a notice on the boat notifying Thomsen that it would become the city’s vessel if it weren’t moved at least five miles by Oct. 27. A day before the deadline, Thomsen used tides, currents and a small speedboat to tow the engine-less boat himself, docking it at Glacier’s pier off of Maury, a little more than five miles from the Tacoma waterfront, Montgomery said. It has sat there ever since.

The Coast Guard, state officials and King County officials are well aware of the vessel and are keeping a close eye on it, they say. The Coast Guard, which several years ago removed 108,000 pounds of hazardous materials from it, checks the Cactus frequently. And the state has sent dive teams down to ensure it is adequately moored and to take a look at the kinds of debris that has fallen off of the boat and onto the eelgrass beds.

But the vessel, despite all of its problems, seems to elude removal.

The state’s list of 170 or so derelict vessels places the boats in 14 categories, from those that are the greatest hazards to those that are the least. The Cactus is listed as a “2b,” the sixth-highest category, which means it is “a probable threat to human health and the environment but not an immediate threat,” Montgomery said.

Since 2003, the state has received about $450,000 a year to remove derelict vessels, funds that it receives by way of a $2 surcharge on boat licensing fees. According to the state’s derelict vessel removal program, a local entity — a city or county, for instance — can seize and remove a vessel, as Tacoma was poised to do with the Cactus four years ago, and get 90 percent of its removal costs reimbursed.

Last year, because of mounting concerns over some of the region’s largest derelict vessels, the Legislature took the effort one step farther. It gave Montgomery’s program a one-time $2 million appropriation to go after large vessels — those that are more than 75 feet — and waived the requirement that local jurisdictions cover 10 percent of the costs.

Twenty-six vessels fall into the large-ship category, Montgomery said, adding, “The Cactus is definitely on my short list.”

But because King County has far fewer vessels to worry about, Montgomery said she’s hoping the county will follow Tacoma’s lead and proactively work to remove the Cactus.

“It would be great if King County would take the lead on this,” she said.

Indeed, the Cactus is high on the county’s list for removal. Sheryl Lux, who handles code enforcement for the county’s Department of Development and Environmental Services, said the Cactus is currently the only vessel the county is actively working to remove. But county officials have been stymied by the fact that Thomsen — reportedly mentally ill and in and out of Western State Hospital — is hard to track down, she said.

“We’re trying to locate a legitimate address to serve the boat owner. Once we have that, … we’ll notify him that it’s illegally stored. And if it’s not moved, we’ll proceed to work with DNR to get it removed,” she said.

Asked why the county doesn’t simply post a notice on the Cactus, like Tacoma did, Lux answered, “I have no access to a boat.”

As for Glacier, Stoltz said he was under the impression the county had yet to act because it couldn’t afford to pay its 10 percent share of the removal costs. Glacier, he said, has offered to cover the county’s share. “But for some reason, the state didn’t feel they could do it that way,” he said.

Meanwhile, some say the region’s struggle with derelict vessels will likely get worse over the next several years, in large part because of the profusion of pleasure boats found in the Sound’s bays and harbors.

Dan Brown, who has lived on Quartermaster Harbor since 1973, remembers his early days on the Island, when he would look out his window and see three or four boats moored to buoys. Now, he counts around 80 in inner Quartermaster, most of them in violation of the law — which requires that they have running lights on their boats. “Nobody does that,” he said.

The number of boats that sink is also growing, he said. And now, nearly every winter, he and a friend engage in a rescue effort or two, pulling listing boats ashore before they become completely submerged, he said.

“You just can’t put your boat out there and walk away,” he said. “But a lot of people do. … It’s a huge problem.”