Break out the champagne
The party gets started Friday morning as champagne bottles are uncorked in celebration of the official opening of the Hagadone Marine Vertical Quick Launch Dry Stack facility.
DEVIN WEEKS/Press
Hagadone Marine team members enjoy a bubbly celebration for the official opening of the Vertical Quick Launch Dry Stack facility.
Forklift operator Cameron Lounsbury, left, and lead forklift operator Steven Orser gesture to pontoon boats stored in vertical slips in Hagadone Marine's new Quick Launch Dry Stack.
Celebrations are in order Friday morning during the opening of the Hagadone Marine Group's Vertical Quick Launch Dry Stack facility.
Hagadone Marine Group team members say "Cheers!" as they celebrate the opening of the Vertical Quick Launch facility Friday morning. From left: Jim Brown, Carl Fus, Melissa Menke, Chris Jenkins, Sarah Tooker, Amy Kobrick, Lindsey Olmstead, Monica Rozier, Molly Mulholland, Nicole Baker, AJ Haynes, Cameron Lounsbury, Steven Orser and Cally King.
COEUR d'ALENE — An enthusiastic champagne spray was a thrilling way to start the day at Hagadone Marine.
The celebration Friday morning marked the opening of the Vertical Quick Launch Dry Stack facility, a state-of-the-art $15 million project that is Lake Coeur d’Alene’s first and only valet boat launch and adds a whole new dimension to services and amenities for North Idaho's boating community.
“It’s a trip,” said Cameron Lounsbury, one of the operators who drives the massive forklifts that raise and lower the boats to their vertical slips.
“I’m excited to see all the people’s reactions when they come in here and look around and are like, ‘How do you guys do it?'” he said.
Hagadone Marine team members merrily popped four bottles of bubbly and soaked in the effervescent moment as they cheered with morning mimosas and showers of champagne.
“It’s been a fun process, from watching it go up to the concrete being laid to everything going vertical to actually getting into the building and putting boats up,” Vertical Quick Launch operations director A.J. Haynes said. "It’s been quite the process for sure."
The project was precisely on target with its projected opening date. The 60-foot tall, more than 47,700-square-foot building on Blackwell Island can house 380 boats within a five-story custom racking system. The top storage rack can handle a 6,000-pound boat.
Two forklifts, at $400,000 and 80,000 pounds each, have the ability to remove and launch or replace and re-stack boats at a rate of one every five minutes.
A 36-slip valet dock is adjacent the storage facility for Quick Launch boats waiting to set sail onto the lake or to be re-shelved.
“The great thing is, because wet slips are so hard to come by now, this is the next big thing for access to the water easily without having to use public ramps which, with the way the town’s growing, can be kind of a headache on the weekend," Haynes said. "The biggest thing for this versus a wet slip is the ease of use and amenities."
The Hagadone Marine Vertical Quick Launch offers its clients services such as fueling, beverages, food, courtesy cleans, "basically a full-service deal," Haynes said.
"It takes away the headache of having and owning a boat," he said. "Just literally show up, park, your boat's ready to go, you go down and use it then you come back and you walk away.”
Moorage manager Melissa Phang Menke said a few Quick Launch slips are still available while the wet slip waitlist has as many as 1,550 people.
"These will give the option to all the people who are waiting for so many years, give them the option to store their boat in a wonderful facility where you get that whole concierge service," Phang Menke said.
“First class service,” she said. "It’s been an adventure to put it together. It also just shows how much effort and passion we all have for our boat community."
