In these consolidated appeals concerning access rights to a boating dock, Robert Ellzey in Case No. A07A2155 appeals that portion of the trial court’s judgment which adopted a special master’s report and awarded dock easement rights to John and Donna Waters collectively “Waters” on the grounds of estoppel and OCGA § 44-9-4. In Case No. A07A1920, the Waters appeal that portion of the special master’s report and trial court’s judgment which refused to award them prescriptive easement rights to the dock or to address their alleged rights to the river. Only half of the trial transcript was included in the appellate record. Being therefore unable to review the various challenges to the evidentiary basis for the judgment, and otherwise discerning no error, we affirm in both cases. The deeds in the record show that in the 1950s and 1960s, a landowner subdivided his property, and in 1962 sold a portion to the Waters’ predecessor-in-interest with a deed that purported to also grant to the Waters’ predecessor free and unimpeded rights to use a boating dock on a nearby river. The Waters eventually purchased their property in 1974 and received a deed that also purported to grant them free and unimpeded rights to use the river dock. After the original landowner’s death, his heirs sold his interest in the dock and in the lot on which the dock was located to Ellzey’s predecessor-in-interest, which 1977 deed was expressly subject to any valid easements of record. When Ellzey purchased his property in 2002, his deed was expressly subject to any easements of record.
The above is based on the deeds introduced into evidence and included in the record. However, because an entire day’s worth of testimony out of the two-day trial was not recorded by the parties, the appellate record is incomplete as to other events occurring over the last 40-plus years concerning the properties and the dock. What testimony is of record construed in favor of the trial court’s judgment, Davis v. Walker 1, when considered in conjunction with the findings of fact by the special master as adopted by the trial court, shows that the Waters and at least one of their predecessors continuously moored a boat at and used the dock accessing it via foot over a path and via vehicle over a road on Ellzey’s predecessors’ land throughout the last 40 years, with Ellzey’s predecessors unreservedly acknowledging their right to do so. Even though expressly aware at the time he purchased his property in 2002 of the dock rights in Waters’ deed and of their open and public access to and use of the dock,2 Ellzey within days of purchasing his property “terminated” the Waters’ rights to the dock and forbade them from further accessing or using the dock.
