We have a standard manual crank up abutting our dock. As mentioned above, you'll need to monitor the water level and (usually) move it further out as the summer and lower water levels run their course. That's an easy one-person job which does however get increasingly uncomfortable as fall and colder water approaches.
I do urge you to carefully assess your planned lift location. In our case, out of necessity, the lift is on a side (left) of our dock which, in October, requires us to move it out and around the far end of the dock and back to an over-the-water deck on which we store it for the winter. That's a two-person job and a pain to drag it over a rocky bottom that in places is five/six feet of cold water at the end of the dock. My wife and I do it now but I'm sure we'll be hiring someone in the not-too-distant future. A steep and rocky bank prevents us from dragging it up onto land from the left side of the dock (it's also a pain getting it back in position in the spring though we somehow manage to do that mostly from the dock itself).
Someday soon, we'll need to have the dock/deck rebuilt and hope to work with a contactor that can figure out a better solution to our situation. There are inflatable airbags made to float a lift if you need to move it a significant distance for set-up or removal (as in our case). This, supposedly, would make the process much easier by simply floating the lift around the dock to where we need to lift it up onto the deck. They're costly however.
Does anyone have any simpler home grown solutions to our type of dilemma?
Nothing is easy.
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