How to: Launch a boat

There is also a sigh of relief and a mini pat on the back when the boat is put in the water… and it floats. I know that may sound silly, it’s a boat it’s made to float, but when you have a guy sandblasting at the steel that constructs the hull, anything could happen. The boat has been sitting in a boat yard for the past three months getting a little “plastic surgery” and taking a break from being worked harder than it has ever been worked before.


My Dad said the other night as we were sitting and enjoying a Peroni (type of Italian beer) and people watching by the water that he is going to push the boat until things begin to fall off. It’s at the point in its life that Dad has replaced a vast majority of what was originally attached, and it’s now or never to push it to the breaking point.

The concept of how the boat actually gets into the water has always escaped me. I’ve seen the cranes and I’ve seen the boats on the stands sitting in the boatyard… or in our case backyards… and I could picture it in my head, but actually seeing it happens is a surreal experience and once, I again, recommend. I tried to capture the process from a distance so you could all see it in pictures.

This is what a boatyard looks like. It’s a place for boats to come to be built, worked on, or, I’m sorry to say, die. Clean is never a word I would use to describe any boatyard I’ve been to. Generally paint and diesel fumes fill the air, and there is always a cloud of dust, whether it’s the dust from the gravel you are walking on or the dust from the sandblasting taking place at the boat next to yours, it’s not clean.

This is a picture of me standing under the boat. The scaffolding has been removed, but we got onto the boat by metal scaffolding that led up to the ladder you can see hanging off the back. The scaffolding was nice because it was more of a surface that we could get luggage and other things up a little bit higher than a basic ladder like the man in the photo is climbing. I took this photo so you had some sort of comparison for the sheer size of a 45ft sailboat.

The men on the boat work for the marina. We just sit back and watch at this point. What they are doing is trying to get the bright orange straps around the hull of the boat so that the weight is equally distributed and so the crane can hook onto the straps and lift the boat without hitting the mast or any of the other “jewelry” located on the deck.

When the bottom is painted, it’s sitting on those stands to keep the boat off of the ground. Well when the boat is lifted off of the stands, there are bare spots where the painter was unable to get to. Generally in other marinas the boat was put back down on the stands to have some sort of stability and to ensure that it wasn’t dropped on whoever was painting, not here. They painted the sports mid-air. It’s not only so the boat looks good underwater for the sharks and fish, but if the steel there was left exposed there would be a lot more growth and risk of rust.

And up it goes. This is a 90 ton crane. It’s made to lift things… like 22 ton boats. It amazed me how easily it picked up the boat. There are all sorts of features that make it able to lift the boat like this. You can’t see it in this photo but there is a counter weight on the back of the crane, and there are red and white stripes on stabilizers that keep it from teetering.

Isn’t she beautiful? You can see how close the top of the crane’s arm is to the mast. Again there are a lot of accessories up there that can be easily knocked off. They did a really great job of not damaging anything at all. Note what way the boat is facing…

It’s facing a different direction. The men that have been holding onto the ropes have essentially been guiding the boat into place. It reminded me of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Now I can’t be sure how much those balloons weigh, and when fully inflated I’m sure it’s quite a lot, but these men had the same ease and control with the 22 ton sailboat as the balloon handlers do on Thanksgiving. It was incredible. When they took the boat out of the water, they weighed it with the crane and saw it was 22 tons… it used to be 20 tons. Like my Dad said, so much for the Mediterranean diet.

It fits like a glove. The crane is easing it into the spot where we are able to keep the boat until we decide to head out, and the men again are just making sure it doesn’t bump into anything. You get a good view of the Tiber River which in this area is very industrial.

And she floats! As they were tying her off before the straps were released Dad went down below to check all of the gauges to ensure that we weren’t taking on water anywhere and gave Mauro, the yard owner and crane operator the thumbs up that we were good to go. At that point the straps are slid off and it’s back in our hands.

This is Dad posing with Mauro, the boat yard owner and Geno, the mechanic. Mauro has been wonderful and such a great resource, he speaks fluent English and is a really nice guy. Geno doesn’t speak any English but I was able to use the one word I KNOW in Italian, fotographia.

So that is a step by step guide on how to get our boat into the water… it takes a really BIG crane and a group of really hard workers.