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The "Dock"
Don't know how to build a boat dock? We'll we had something in common then.
Where there’s water there’s always a dock nearby. Well I didn’t have a dock which meant I had to build one. Oddly there wasn’t much information on how to build small docks on the Internet. There were plenty of places that sold floatation barrels for docks though. They wanted an arm and a leg for them so they got ruled out right away in the beginning. It comes to find out that most floatation devices are the same high density foam as construction blue board. That’s the stuff you see construction workers siding the foundation of houses with when they’re being built. I found a reference to the buoyancy of blue board (amount of floatation something provides). It stated that blue board should handle 55 pounds per cubic foot. That’s easy enough to understand. I know how much I weigh and roughly that of my friends so that was easy enough to figure out how much blue board I needed to hold up my friends and me but what I didn’t know was how much a 176 square foot boat dock built out pressure treated lumber weighed. But, I figured I’d build it full of blue board and if it sank I’d know what not to build again.
The boat dock is in the shape of a T. The walkway is 12’ long by 4’ wide. I was going to make it 3’ but that might be hard to navigate when you are drunk. The top of the “T” is 8’ long by 10’ wide. Plenty of space to throw a couple of chairs out on and sit and fish.
I built the 12’ X 8’ section in my garage. I figured it would be easier there where I didn’t have to deal with my generator, etc. There’s not much to it. It’s a box with 100,000,000 planks on it. Underneath the planks are (4) 2” 4’X8’ pieces of blue board. I took off all the planks with the exception of a few and we loaded the first part into my truck for transit. After getting to the land I put all the planks on it and we pushed it into the water – AND IT FLOATED! As a matter of fact it floated quite well.
I also built the second part of the dock in my garage. This piece was too big to stick in my truck so I had to take it apart completely and put it back together at the land. Strangely it took about 4 hours for me to put this sucker back together. Probably because it had about 600,000 screws that held it all together. This section contained 8 2” 4’X8’ pieces of blue board. Geneva and I pushed it out onto the water AND IT FLOATED TOO!. I bolted the two pieces together and stuck on the final planks and it was rock solid. I secured the dock to the pond edge with (2) 1/4” steel rods. I thought about sinking some 4X4 posts but if I want to move the dock ever all I have to do is remove the steel rods from the ground and move the dock. It’d take all of about 5 minutes to move the dock.
I also built a rescue station for when Geneva trips down the hill because she's wearing clogs.
Welp that’s it. I can’t wait to dock the paddle boat there or spend a couple nights fishing from it.
Be sure to visit the
How I Built the Boat Dock section.
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