It takes a 100-ton crane to splash Dragonfly and you don’t really get a sense of just how massive she is until you see her suspended in the air above you. Before Donny got the American crane we had to take off the mast before pulling her from the water, nowadays they just move her with the mast in place. It makes the process much faster and saves wear and tear on the rigging.

As you can see from the photos it takes quite a number of “handlers” to put her in the water: tag lines from each end of the two hulls, not to mention about eight people required to rig the hoisting straps to the crane cables. When ever these big cats get “picked” it draws a crowd of volunteers as well as onlookers.

Dragonfly has only about 10-12″ clearance in and out of the notch, so the line handlers need to “spot” the cat as it drops into the notch. Fortunately this 40,000 pounds moves around easily when suspended from 120′ up.

On this day we splashed the 64′ Dragonfly and pulled the 60′ Bossanova, a boat that was built exactly the same time Al built Dragonfly.