In this recent post I mentioned that I had acquired a pair of floating jet ski docks which came with a small wooden floating dock. At first I thought I only wanted one of the jet ski docks and would sell the other jet ski dock and probably get rid of the somewhat rough looking floating dock. But after only a very short amount of use I realized that I could make use of everything I bought.
One fairly significant issue that we had was getting on and off of Third Wave when she is docked on the seawall. The tide swings about 3 feet here in Freeport. At high tide a man in good physical shape could step from the concrete to the boat reasonably safely but women and children would be taking a risk in trying to do so. But at low tide it wasn't safe for anyone, much less someone who may have been drinking, etc. So we needed a solution for getting on and off of Third Wave regardless of the tide, and floating docks are a common solution for this issue.
We also wanted to do it at reasonable cost. You see, I spent $14k on putting in a small dock and 4 storm mooring pilings and then another $3k putting in 2 more pilings for everyday docking. With this kind of money already invested I wanted to keep the spend down and the best way to do this is DIY. Marine work here in Freeport is a premium. The thinking is that if you have money for a yacht, you have money to pay for someone to make a dock. But there are plenty of ways to spend money so Kyle and I decided to solve this important usability issue ourselves.
The first thing we did was to install doubled 2x6 lumber across 2 of my dock pilings. We needed this in order to create a temporary crane that would be used to haul up the wooden floating dock so that we could repurpose it. That is item 1 in the picture below. Item 2 is an old chain hoist that I happened to not throw away during the international move. Item 3 is the floating dock after it has been hoisted up onto my fixed dock and then cut down by 3 feet. In this picture, 2 of the 3 floats have been cleaned up, repaired, and reinstalled. A 3rd float went in between them later on. Item 4 is a 2x10 piece of lumber that we wrapped in glass cloth and then gel coated in order to eliminate future rotting and any maintenance. This was used for the main connection of the hinged ramp down to the floating dock. You can see that galvanized hinges have already been installed as #5. These hinges are the only galvanized hardware that we used, and that is because stainless was not available. All other lag bolts, carriage bolts and other hardware was stainless.
We then created a simple rectangle out of 2x6 lumber using four of the locally sourced corner brace hinge combo units below. VERY handy.
We then installed hinge hardware on the floating dock and connected the ramp. At first this did not work because the floating portion was not wide enough and it would tilt badly under its own weight. And so we created 2 stabilizer bars out of more 2x6 lumber and then hinged them to the top of the far side of the dock using more of the angle hinges shown above. This did the trick perfectly. The dock does move horizontally with the tide but only about 18 inches so not enough to affect usability. Finally we screwed planks across the rectangular ramp frame to complete the construction.
When all of this wood is nice and dry we will take steps to protect it from the elements. Most people don't trouble with this but if we take care of this it could last more than just a few years. In the fullness of time we will install outdoor LED rope lights under the stabilizer bars for safety and to enhance the looks at night.
Many thanks to Kyle, who spent several days of his vacation working on this, and "D.J." our very capable local helper for making this come together so nicely.
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