Set your lift off the real swing

Low water sets the height, wake sets the rest

A lift is the piece of a Fort Myers dock that cares most about exactly where it sits. The Caloosahatchee is tidal, and that tide reaches back into the canal streets off the river too, so the water in front of your seawall is a range rather than a number. The cradle has to hang clear when the river is down and still take your boat cleanly when it is up. Set it off one afternoon's water level and you learn about the other end of the range later, usually with the boat already on the bunks.

The second thing this water does is push you around while you are docking. Open frontage on the river collects wake most of the day, and wake tends to arrive exactly when you are lined up on the cradle at idle with no steerage to spare. That is what guide posts are for, and out here they stop being an upgrade and start being the point. Bunks get fitted to your hull so the boat settles the same way every time, whichever way the river nudged you on the way in.

None of that is a phone call answer. The owner crosses the river from Cape Coral and works out capacity, beam heights and piling placement with your boat and your frontage both in front of him. What your particular stretch of the Caloosahatchee does through the day is the thing that decides it, and the only way to know that is to stand on the seawall and look. That visit is free, and nothing gets ordered before it happens.