Raising a 23 ft Chris-Craft Cavalier in Boca Raton, FL

A 23 ft Chris-Craft Cavalier with decades of barn dust and a cracked keel strip sat in a slip with her deck awash and bow slightly up. The owner inherited her and had never seen her float. After the first hard rain, she sank into the slip.

The marina office was the complication. They wanted the boat gone before the next tide, with no damage to the neighbors' boats and nothing floating loose in the basin. We had one narrow window. A boom went around the slip first, then straps under the hull and lift bags along the keel line to protect the crack. We raised her slowly so the strip stayed closed.

Roughly three hours. We guided her out with hand lines for the tow, then trailered the Cavalier inland to a repair yard. The hull was sound, so this one ended as a salvage, not a scrap pile, and the sunken boat removal was clean.