Raising a 23 ft Chris-Craft Cavalier in Palm City, FL

Under decades of barn dust, the 23 ft Chris-Craft Cavalier carried a cracked keel strip, and it found water the first week she got wet. She went onto a mooring after a sale fell through, took on water through the strip, and settled by the stern with the bow pointing up.

The obstacle was the mooring. There was no dock to work from, so the crew brought two skiffs and rigged the lift from the water. One diver went down to patch the keel strip, and a second skiff stood by with extra air in case she shifted.

It took about five hours, most of it spent waiting on a pump to clear the cabin. Once she floated, we towed her to a ramp and trucked her toward Stuart to a repair yard. The old wood was dry and the hull was sound apart from the strip, so she had a future. Nothing went to the crusher. A job like that is why sunken boat removal is not always a teardown, and the salvage was clean.