Whittaker Dock Redo

In spite of the blistering heat this summer, I have occasionally been on my bike. Sometime in the past week Adam and I made it out to Whittaker Creek Marina and walked the east dock. Happily, the dockmaster is replacing the entire dock, maybe 100 yards worth of wood planks. This is the view one way:

And the other way. He still needs to trim the planks' edges even.

To assist with the work, he has a long floating barge in the marina cut, next to the dock, loaded with a back hoe with a pile driver attachment on it. See the long pilings lying on the barge?

Here are two pilings. The bottom one is the new one. The top one is the extracted, old one. See the water line?

The new piling is much longer than the old one

Here's the spot where the work was at the moment. The wood weathers grey and brown.

The lines lying on the docks are grey and weathered too.

At the spot where the old dock wood meets the new, a plank lies across for boat owners to step over. Many boats had to be moved to alternate slips to make way for the barge and the piling extraction.

Maintaining a dock is no easy job! And our brackish water is rather tough on everything.
Even the boat boxes where people store things had to be moved out of the way.

These short dock extensions are being removed and redone as well.

Boats were moved from this water. The big blue library boat (okay, it's a library in my imagination!) used to float here. Remember it?

What a mess! The narrow slice of water where the barge sits is between the land and the dock, which runs parallel to the land. So the barge serves the purpose of passing the old pilings across to the land. See them stacked in the background? That way, the dockmaster doesn't have to haul those pilings down the dock, around the corner, and by the club house.

The barge is pushed around by a cute little tug boat of sorts. This is a casual operation, but it's still not cheap. We were told that each piling costs $750 to replace. That's quite a cost. The slip owners have bought their slips, and they pay an association fee too. Many slip owners rent out their slips to others if their own boats are not there.

There you have it. Today's temps and humidity are so very lovey -- what a relief! We will go biking in town, and next time we're out at Whittaker I'll try to remember to take photos and give an update on the new dock.