Built to stay put in moving water
A dock goes in over a few calm weeks, then spends thirty winters taking whatever the Salish Sea sends: king tides, southeast gales, drift logs at night, a boat coming in too fast. Building it is the easy part. What matters is how it stands in year twenty.
So we build for year twenty: steel and timber sized for the swell in front of your property, our own barge and divers, and one crew from the first site visit to the last bolt.
Every pile driven to the bottom
We drive piles until the seabed stops them, then we test each one. After 38 years around Sidney and the Gulf Islands our crew has met every bottom out here: mud, gravel, shell and bedrock.
1,100+
DOCKS AND FLOATS BUILT
38
years on the salish sea
26 KM
of shoreline protected
What we build
Anything that has to stand in salt water and stay level. Pick one to see the ones we have built.
Our difference? Divers.
Every job ends with one of our divers underneath it, checking each pile, chain and anchor before we hand it over. Here is what else comes with the crew.
Our own barge
We run our own 60-foot crane barge, the Hold Fast, so your job starts when the tide and the weather say go. Piles, floats and rock all arrive by water: no trucks across your lawn, no ramp torn up on the way in.
Permits, handled
Work below the high-water mark in BC needs sign-off from the Province and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and often Transport Canada and the local First Nation.
We draw the plans, file every application and answer every question. The paperwork starts the week you call.
Built for this water
Hot-dip galvanized steel, treated timber and floats sized for the fetch in front of your property, the stretch of open water the wind builds waves across. A float in a sheltered cove and one facing Haro Strait are different jobs, and we build them that way.
A dive every spring
For ten years after we finish, a diver looks over your dock every spring and sends you photos of everything below the waterline.
Small fixes stay small when you catch them early.
"They showed up by water at six in the morning with a crane on a barge and had our piles in before the tide turned. Two king tides later the float has not moved an inch."
"Slack Water handled every permit for our breakwater. All we had to do was sign where Lena told us to."
"Every spring we get an email with photos from under our dock. I did not know I wanted that until the year it caught a cracked bracket."
"Our seawall had been failing for ten years. They rebuilt 140 metres of it in one season and the lawn finally stopped sliding into the sea."
"The best crew I have had on a waterfront job. Quiet, tidy, and they finished a week early."
"Our boathouse has been through four winters on an exposed shore. It still looks like the day they floated it in."
