A calm canal is still salt water

Where the lift actually mounts

A lift does not get installed in a town. It gets installed at one spot, on one seawall, and that spot is what the owner comes to look at. How wide is the water in front of you. Which direction do you come home from. What does the cradle leave the walkway once your hull is sitting in it. In a canal network this size those answers change street by street, so two lifts a few doors apart can want different beam layouts for reasons you can only see standing at the water.

Then there is height, which is the Port Charlotte part people underestimate. Your canal may look like a swimming pool most afternoons, but it is plumbed straight into Charlotte Harbor, and the harbor takes its cues from wind and from the river water arriving nearby. When the water in your canal gets pushed around, you want the boat carried well above the fuss instead of hovering just over it. So the beams get set to carry it up there, and the bunks get fitted to your particular hull, which is a measuring job rather than a bolt pattern.

Distance is the other thing owners ask about, and it is an ordinary week for us. The barge comes up across the top of the harbor from Cape Coral carrying what the job needs, so an install back in the Port Charlotte grid runs the same as one three streets from home base. Quiet water does not soften the salt either. It works the waterline in a protected canal exactly the way it does out on the harbor, and a lift is a machine bolted over that, so the hardware gets chosen for it from the start. At the end Alex puts your boat up in it and cycles it in front of you before he calls the job done.