Boat Lifts: Good or Bad for Your Fishing Boat?

If you have a saltwater fishing boat that you want to use at a moment’s notice, you may want to keep it at a marina rather than trailering it around. Some marinas offer dry stack storage, which works well for some people. But others don’t want to have to call ahead and/or wait to get their boat from the stack to the water. That leaves wet slips, and lifts. Wet slips certainly make it easy to jump in and go, but require bottom paint, create dirty waterlines, and can be problematic during big tidal swings or storms. What about lifts?

Lifts are great, but they aren’t a panacea.

Boat lifts offer almost all the advantages of dry stack storage since they keep your fishing machine suspended well above the water, but they also have some downsides. Some lifts go up and down slowly, big tidal swings can make it challenging to get the boat on or off, and they’re expensive. The biggest problem with lifts, however, is that they can give you a false sense of security when a significant storm hits. Often, lift-kept boats are the hardest hit. If you leave the drain plug in, a heavy rainfall can fill the boat up with water until the battery dies and your bilge pump quits. If you don’t leave the plug in, an abnormally high tide can flood the boat just as easily. If you tie it down in the lift it can get swamped either way. And if you don’t tie it down and a huge tide comes up it can float right off of the bunks.

The bottom line? Lift-kept boats are in a lot more danger during a major storm than boats kept on land, and may fare even worse than those kept in wet slips. Setting storms aside, however, they’re a great way to keep your boat clean, fresh, paint-free, and ready for use at a moment’s notice. So if putting your boat in a lift seems right for you, go for it – just remember that when a hurricane or other major-league storm rolls in, you’ll want to pull it off the lift and put that fishboat on dry land where it’s safest.