A few weeks ago, it came time to say goodbye to a beloved member of our waterfront family. Over the past few years, we knew she’d been living on borrowed time. Years of sun and wind had taken their toll on skin, bones, and connective tissue until the poor old gal could no longer support life. And one day, she just collapsed. I’m referring to our floating dock. At the time, I was preparing to launch a standup paddleboard and it was my life she was supporting.
This was not your normal wooden dock. She’d been expertly crafted by a neighbor up the creek with a downsloping ramp along her centerline to winch and hold his skiff. When he bought a bigger boat and a plastic floating ramp 11 years ago, I leapt at the chance to replace our much smaller concrete-and-foam floater with his 10-by-15-foot masterpiece. Since then, it has been integral to our lives through 9,000-plus tidal cycles, scores of ferocious nor’easters, summertime squalls, and several bouts of 100-mile-an-hour hurricane winds. It has impaled us with splinters, and its oyster homesteaders have sliced our skin. It has hosted countless sun- and pluff-mudbathing sessions (our daughter and her friends smear our local marsh goo all over themselves—it’s way more therapeutic than any spa offering), dolphin-watching sessions, blue-crab landings, cast-net throws for shrimp and mullet, cannonball contests, and kayak, paddleboard, and of course, boat launches. Casting off for Morris Island, or points beyond and motoring up our little creek, I always think of how Jimmy Buffett described a small bayou behind his grandmother’s house that emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. “I remembered my grandfather’s stories and the pictures in National Geographic of faraway, exciting places. That little bayou, I thought, could lead me there.”
If you’re fortunate enough to live on the water, it’s easy to take your dock for granted. It just sits there patiently, rising and falling with the tide, until you need it. It asks for little more than to have its screws and nails checked and for the occasional coat of Thompson’s Water Seal. But time and tide wait for no man, and no dock. Eventually, mother nature wins and you’ll be at the point where I am now. A trip to the lumber store for planks, braces, galvanized bolts, and stainless-steel screws.
I try to imagine what life would have been like for our kids if they hadn’t grown up with that dock. All the adventures and mishaps. All the life lessons. Connected to the mainland by a hinged walkway, it’s been a true gateway to a wider, watery world. This weekend, I’ll be pulling it up onto the mud bank behind our house to take it apart. I plan to reuse the floats and whatever timbers might reveal themselves to still be solid. I’ve thought about honoring her remains by sending them up the creek with a sail and shooting them with a flaming arrow, Viking style. But of course, the neighbors would howl and that would release old pressure-treating toxins into the water. Nope, those timbers will be sent off to the landfill, with new ones to take their place.
And then, the circle of dock life will begin anew.
This article originally appeared in the August/September 2026 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
