Santa Boat Last Seen in Fenton, Headed North

Yesterday the RFT reported on a fleeting miracle on Arsenal Street. Some kind neighbors spruced up a long-abandoned boat with a Santa Claus, garland and a reindeer.

But just as quickly as the boat was made holly and jolly, it disappeared.

The City Towing Division told us they didn't tow it. The police said the same thing.

In the past 24 hours the RFT has gotten a few Santa boat-related tips as well as chased down a few leads from Facebook. We spent the morning driving around south city to locations of alleged Santa boat sightings.

A few of the tips did lead us to boats, but the watercraft proved to be of the regular, not-at-all festive variety. We've read that the first 24 hours are crucial in any missing Santa boat case, so we started to get worried.


Then we got an email from a reader who said that yesterday she saw the Santa boat on Loughborough Avenue and was so amused by the sight that she and her fiancé followed it onto Highway 55. From there it headed to Interstate 270 — and the intrepid RFT-reading couple trailed it all the way to Fenton.

"It was being pulled by a dark-colored SUV or truck, I can’t really remember because we were just amused by the little Santa figure going wild in the back," she wrote. "We even joked he was sea sick from all the motion."

The couple lost the Santa boat when it turned right onto 141 headed north. Our tipsters instead turned left to do shopping at Gravois Bluffs.

Incidentally, another Santa boat-related mystery was solved yesterday: Who took it upon themselves to spruce up the abandoned boat that had long bedeviled neighbors in Tower Grove South?

On the neighborhood's Facebook page, Emily Warschefsky posted a photo of herself with the newly decorated boat before its disappearance, writing, "Although we had hoped Santa would stick around longer, we’ve had so much fun seeing everyone’s reactions — glad we were able to spread some holiday cheer!"

Warschefsky was aided in the merry endeavor by Greg Toumayan.

"We were super disappointed that the boat went missing within a day of setting it up," Toumayan tells the RFT.

He says that, not unlike those houses robbed by the Grinch, "everything was taken, including all the decorations and the old rusty crowbar in the ground that was holding up the reindeer."

Toumayan also has a few clues into how the boat got to Arsenal in the first place.

He says that the day he and Warschefsky decorated the boat they spoke to some friends of the people who it belonged to. "They told us that the boat was severely damaged, while parked on Arsenal, from a car crashing into the back of it," Toumayan says. "The boat was totaled, and the out-of-town owners abandoned it."

Well, the boat is abandoned no more. It has a Santa pilot and presumably some new owners.

We hope the Santa boat brings a little holiday cheer to the good people of Fenton (or wherever the Santa boat ends up).

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