The 163-foot freighter Caribbean Sea Horse was preparing to depart for Haiti with a cargo of scooters and a couple of cars when Hurricane Wilma blew through the Florida Keys in 2005. It has been resting on its side along the seawall at Robbie's Full Service Boatyard ever since.

Now a salvage crew is using a huge steel guillotine with a 17-ton blade to cut the rusting hulk at the entrance to Safe Harbor into manageable pieces for scrapping.

A crew with Miami-based Associated Marine Salvage Inc., which has been in the Lower Keys working on the USS Vandenberg artificial reef project, began cutting the vessel into slices over the weekend. The guillotinelike apparatus and 225-ton crane operate from a large barge.

Workers plan to slice the vessel into nearly a dozen sections small enough to be lifted from the water and placed in the boatyard. There, workers will use welding torches to cut up the vessel into smaller sections that can be loaded on a tractor-trailer and hauled out of the Keys.

The $350,000 project is expected to wrap up within a month, Robbie's owner Michael Reckwerdt said.

"This is a major salvage job with a major crew," Robbie's General Manager Chad Gibson said while watching the activity Monday. "This is no small job."

After it sank, the freighter became a haven for fish and lobster, but an eyesore and navigation hazard, Reckwerdt said.

"We are just happy this is finally being removed," he said. "Everybody is helping us because getting this out of here is good for everybody."

tohara@keysnews.com