BELFAST - Much has been said about the capacity of the two travel lifts at Front Street Shipyard. The smaller, 160-ton hoist was heralded as the largest of its kind north of Newport, Rhode Island, when the company put it into service in 2011. Today it is dwarfed by a 480-ton lift that has brought ashore a number of 100-plus-foot mega yachts and heavy commercial boats.

But the lifts plenty of more modestly-sized boats — the ones Shipyard President JB Turner has called the “bread and butter” of the three-year-old business — and even some really little ones.

On Friday, while a crew prepared the larger lift to launch a 75-foot motor yacht, a separate group of workers maneuvered the smaller one up to a pickup truck with boat trailer bearing a 20-foot, single-masted sailboat. They looped two of the lift’s massive straps under the boat’s seemingly-tiny hull, lifted it gingerly off the trailer and a few minutes later set it down in the harbor.

The company this kind of thing all the time, according to one of the workers, who was helping to launch the little boat with the smaller, but still very big travel lift. 

An advantage of doing it that way, instead of using a ramp-style boat launch, he said, is that the boat trailer doesn’t get dunked in corrosive salt water.

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com