sbw1
Well-Known Member
- Oct 10, 2006
- 8,191
- Boat Info
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- Engines
- This is listed in my signature
On lakes where you have lots of wave action from boaters and from wind, floating docks fail due to the moving and twisting of the joints. We considered doing a floating dock about the same time a neighbor installed one. His failed after two years. As you know, docks are not cheap. Ours is going on twenty years now and shows no signs of wear other than normal weathering of the treated decking. It will likely go another 10-20 years before needing new decking. So, we do them because they last a long time and continue to look good. We seldom need to use the ladder and use the steps only for the ocassional season when water is really high. Mostly things are about right.I grew up on Lake Huron and got used to the fixed-level docks. Then moved away and where we are now there are only floating docks.
Makes me wonder why, in areas like the Great Lakes where there is so much variance in water levels that they would build fixed docks. Our here we might have 3' difference in levels from high years to low years, but with floating docks it makes no diff what the water level is.
Here are two pics of our floating docks....
I realize most fixed-level docks wouldn't need to be this fancy but certainly it wouldn't be much more difficult to make the docks so they could float up and down on the pilings.