A Shipwright in Training

Mystic has a new lift dock that’s been in the works for a long time. A lift dock is a dock that drops down in the water. You drive your boat up over the dock, brace it underwater, and then the dock slowly rise up with the boat on it. A few weeks ago the builders did the final load tests by lifting a barge filled with water (woah, LOTS of weight).

Last week we did our first actual boat lift with it, the Emma C Berry.

First they sailed her in and tied her up to keep her centered.

Rob donned diving gear to make sure that the boat was centered on the blocks and to set up the poppets that would brace her once she was out of the water.

And then she slowly came up over about a 15 minute period.

Pretty cool, eh? The boat gets lifted all the way to the level of the surrounding dock where folks are standing, but I didn’t take a photo of that.

The motors are housed inside the little red covered boxes along the side. They’re actually quite small, but they drive a big reduction gear that drives a series of pulleys. They’re amazingly powerful units.

There’s a set of wide-spaced railroad tracks installed on the dock.

The next phase of the project is to build a railway to match on the land. Boats will come in and rest on platforms built on railway wheels. They’ll be rolled off the dock, and then rolled sideways to a little siding where we’ll work on them.

The next big shop project is planking the Morgan, our whaling ship. That won’t start until late fall / early winter, but it’ll be pretty huge.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Mystic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.