Wind + Unoccupied Boat Lift

We spent last week at my wife’s family cabin. Mid-week, we had a motor problem with the pontoon, so I hauled it in to get fixed, leaving the pontoon lift unoccupied. Early Thursday morning, a storm blew through. I awoke to find this carnage. The pontoon lift in the foreground of the photo was on the other side of the upside-down dock, and the upside-down dock was, well, not upside down. Somehow, I slept through it, but that would have been quite a sight to see!

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Ralph:

I am impressed that the lift didn’t look like it some where down the shoreline!!!

Mark

Lucky the thing wasn’t bent up like a pretzel and hanging up in a tree somewhere. I’ve seen some bad stuff happen to boat lifts that got caught in high winds.

“Seen” is not exactly accurate in one case. The lift was gone and we tried to find it using sonar units as the owner suspected the boat lift ended up on the bottom in about 40 feet of water. And that was after the boat came off. Needless to say the boat looked like busted @ss.

Grouse

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

Lucky the thing wasn’t bent up like a pretzel and hanging up in a tree somewhere.

The canopy frame is trashed, but the lift itself seemed to function fine. And the canopy tarp looked fine, too. I normally wouldn’t leave an empty lift, but in this case, I wasn’t about to pull the canopy off for the few days the pontoon was going to be gone. Whoops!