When we boated in for Memorial Day week, I was relieved to see the boathouse still on its cribbing. But the dock caught my eye right away. In dozens of trips to Starkey's the main dock has never been an issue. But somehow, this year, the foam floats under the landward section of the dock worked their way free and blew away.
The floats -- 8 feet long, 18 inches wide, and 7 inches thick -- were nowhere in sight. It's an expensive loss: they cost about $120 each to replace and there were eight missing.
Our answer was to lift the dock up with improvised jacks on four corners, slide the floats under, and lower the dock back down. We bought four bolt-on lashing winches (like truckers use on flat-bed trailers to secure loads) and four heavy-duty tow straps rated for 3,000 lbs each. Each winch was mounted at the top between two wooden posts that straddle the ledger boards on the dock. The posts sit on plywood weight-spreading pads on the lakebed. Thankfully the dock is in shallow water so we could get by with 8-foot tall jacking posts.