Anderson Dock and Lift services and repairs boat lifts across Manatee and Sarasota counties, including lifts we did not install. That last part matters, because most of what we work on came with the house. We are a Florida Certified Specialty Contractor, license SCC131152520, and if what you have is past saving we will tell you that instead of selling you a repair that buys a season.
If you are choosing a new lift rather than fixing one, start at boat lifts.
Stop using it if you see any of these
Some problems can wait for a scheduled visit. These cannot.
- Rust bleeding from the cable strands. The visible rust is coming from inside the cable
- Travel that is uneven or hesitant under load
- Grinding from the drive
- Visible wear where the cable runs over the sheave
Any one of those is a stop signal, not a monitor signal. A cable does not give much warning between looking tired and letting go, and what is underneath it when it does is the boat.
Cables are the wear item, and they fail from the inside
The strands you can see are not the ones that decide when a cable is finished.
Salt works into the core of a wire rope and corrodes it from within, so a cable can lose a meaningful share of its strength while the outside still looks serviceable. Rust weeping from between the strands is that internal corrosion arriving at the surface. Birdcaging, where the strands splay outward, is the other end of the same story and means the cable is done.
We replace cables in matched sets rather than one at a time. A new cable paired with a three year old one puts the load where it does not belong, and you end up doing the job twice.
Motors, drives and limit switches
The drive is usually neglected until it stops.
We work on motor replacement, gearbox and drive repair, alignment, and limit switch adjustment, which is the setting that decides where the cradle stops at the top and bottom of its travel. A limit switch drifting out of adjustment is one of the cheapest problems on a lift and one of the most expensive to ignore, because the cradle keeps traveling into something.
What salt actually does, and what it does not
The site copy on a lot of lift pages gets this backward, so it is worth being precise.
Galvanic corrosion is the ordinary one. Put two dissimilar metals in contact in salt water and you have built a battery, and the less noble metal gives itself up. That is why sacrificial anodes exist and why replacing them on schedule is real maintenance rather than an upsell. Salt water does not create this by itself. It makes the water a far better conductor, which makes the reaction run harder and faster.
Stray current corrosion, the thing people usually mean when they say electrolysis, is a different problem with a different cause. It comes from a wiring fault putting current where it does not belong, not from salinity. It will strip metal off submerged hardware quickly, and because the cause is electrical, no amount of anodes fixes it. Finding it means checking the grounding and bonding, not adding zinc.
Both are worth knowing apart, because the fix for one does nothing for the other.
The frame has a clock on it, and the number is published
How hard this coast is on steel has been measured by people with no stake in your lift.
The American Galvanizers Association places any structure within 250 feet of salt water in the marine splash and heavy salt spray zone, which it calls aggressive to hot dip galvanized steel. Its coastal guidance reports rust appearing inside 5 to 7 years on surfaces taking direct salt wind, while sheltered surfaces on the same structure went 15 to 25 years longer before needing attention.
Every waterfront lot on this coast is inside that 250 foot band. Two things follow. The first is that rinsing the lift with fresh water after use is not fussiness, it is the highest return thing an owner does. The second is that the face of the frame you never look at, the one taking the prevailing wind off the water, is the one that goes first, so that is where we look.
The pilings under the lift are part of the lift
A lift is only as good as what it is bolted to, and on this coast the wood is under attack from the day it goes in.
The American Wood Protection Association puts everything south of Georgia and along the Gulf coasts in Use Category UC5C, Marine Use Southern Waters. It is the most severe marine category in the national standard, and the only one that adds Martesia and Sphaeroma on top of the borers found in northern and central waters. Wood here is working against the worst borer pressure the standard recognizes.
So when a lift starts behaving oddly, the piling is on the list of suspects alongside the drive. Rot caught at the waterline is a candidate for piling wraps. Rot caught late is a replacement. If the dock underneath needs attention too, that runs through dock repair.
Taking over a lift somebody else installed
This is a large share of the work, and it usually starts the same way.
The lift came with the house, the installer is gone or unresponsive, and nobody can tell you when the cables were last changed or whether the anodes have ever been replaced. We assess what is actually there, tell you what it is, and give you a written scope and price for what it needs.
We carry Sea Mount and Hurricane on the new installation side and service those and others. If your lift is a line we do not stock parts for, we will say so rather than fitting something close enough.
Sometimes the answer is that it is fine
We tell owners their lift is sound and needs nothing this year more often than people expect, and we would rather do that than manufacture a job.
We will also tell you the opposite when it applies: that the sensible money is a replacement rather than a third repair on a frame that has run out of service life. Either way you get the reasoning, not just the number.
A waterfront inspection is the cheap version of this conversation. It looks at the lift alongside the seawall, the dock and the pilings, because those structures share a load path and inspecting one of them answers the wrong question.
Service area and next step
We work Florida’s Gulf Coast out of Bradenton, reaching through Sarasota and the surrounding counties. Marina, restaurant and association work runs through commercial marine construction, where the loads and the scheduling are different.
Tell us the lift, the boat, and what it is doing that it did not used to do. Request an estimate or contact us. Estimates come back within 24 business hours. For personal watercraft, see jet ski lifts.