Trip to Belfast

This is a test run for our travel blog which we hope to start the first week in October.  So, to see if I can jump thru all the hoops and load pictures etc.  I will try to tell you a little about a trip we took to Belfast yesterday and hope I can remember how to do this. 

Very impressive changes in the Front Street Shipyard.  For anyone not familiar with this shipyard, it is a fairly new business with hopes of becoming a custom boat building facility as well as marina and boat repair.




FSS has a huge boat lift.  It is 40 ft high and can lift 165 metric tons.

  I started talking to a guy who was also taking pictures and it turns out that he knows a lot about this place.  His name is Merv and he tells me he is a Naval Architect, retired, and he and his boat  pull into Belfast in the summer and Fla in the winter.

So Merv says that one of the reasons that there are all those big catamarans and sailboats is  not only that a lot of the boats wanted out of the water for the recent storms, but that the nearest similarly able lift is in Norfolk, Va.

He also showed me this cat that is owned by an Italian man who is handicapped and confined to a wheelchair, so he has this lift on his custom built cat.

 Merv says this handicapped man often takes other wheelchair bound people  on the boat.

I guess he was in for repair/refurbishing  judging from the washing machine that I can see in the back of the picture there.  Looks like there are still clothes in it.  
A washer in your sailboat?  That is custom!


So, maybe when we come back in the spring,  Building 5 which is planned for this footprint,

 will be in progress.  It is where the lift will take the big boats for repair.  It will be 55 feet high  and have 40 ft high doors.  


Merv said that as a Naval Architect, his favorite boat here was a sailboat that cost $ 8 million .  He couldn't show me which one it was but I would like to see the family/person who owns an $8mil boat.