Is anyone in the market for a 45-year-old tow boat? The answer is apparently yes — and D.C. Water is primed to cash in.

This auction, part of a normally routine surplus equipment purge, caught our eye this morning: the District’s sewer and water authority is auctioning off a Surplus U.S. Army Bridge-Erection Boat, and it’s really picking up steam. With 14-plus days remaining in the auction, bidding is already up to $411 — and it’s about as hot as surplus auctions get: there’s already been 33 bids.

Maybe you’re like us and wondered what D.C. Water actually used a 27-foot tow boat for. Alan Heymann, Director of D.C. Water’s Office of Public Affairs, filled us in:

We actually have two skimmer boats in operation and they remove trash from the Anacostia River. It’s mostly small trash, so typically, someone in a boat from the federal government would be picking up giant tree branches and or dead animals. The boat that’s on surplus was used if one of those two skimmers ever broke down and needed to be towed somewhere because its a tow boat, or, if there was something really, really big in the river that we needed to remove, we would just pull it out with [the boat]. We got a new one, and this one was 1965 vintage.

So bidders are looking at a boat that has, over the years, assisted in collecting some of the rankest pieces of refuse from one of the East Coast’s most polluted waterways. Yum. Nothing says classy like taking that special someone in your life out for a cruise in your brand new Anacostia River garbage collector, eh?

While the auction’s insistence that the winning buyer needs to pick up and ship the boat themselves will preclude this DCist editor from getting in on the action, we hope whoever ends up winning the auction enjoys many years of happy sailing in their surplus trash boat.