Storm damage - boat is okay

[OK Toon]

Friday afternoon on Lake Eufaula, a sudden storm either brought through strong straight-line winds or a small tornado. We have 4 pins on the corners of our dock, but they were no match to the storm. It turned our dock 90 degrees and snapped our walkway in half. Luckily we didn't lose a 40' section of walkway -- it remained connected on 1 end. Also fortunately, no damage to our pontoon boat that was still on the lift. But we did lose 3 deck panels on the walkway. Our dock repair guy was able to reset our dock on Saturday and re-attach our walkway. But with the lake still so high, we can only access our dock by getting out on the pedal boat. I think I'm ready for summer 2015 to be over.

[RcgTexas]

Glad damage was no worse than that. Hope things get better soon. Glad the boat was unharmed!

[Bamaman]

You're very lucky things came out so well.

We had a commercial boat dock 5 times that size that broke loose, floated 2 miles and got lodged under a bridge. It tore up a bunch of boats.

A couple of years later, a tornado came through and picked up the same docks 12' in the air--despite 125,000 lbs. of concrete weights on the bottom of the lake. Needless to say, a bunch of boats sustained great damage.

I guess it's a lesson that insurance is important, especially on boats left in docks.

[OldePharte]

Whoa! So are the corner pins what some would call mud poles? And yes, I'd say you got lucky that the dock didn't float away.

[OK Toon]

Never heard them referred to as "mud poles" before, but I guess since they do sit down in the muddy bottom of the lake, you could call them that. Luckily we had 1 pin hold and the dock just rotated around the pivot point. What we discovered when the dock guy pulled up the 2 pins on the left side (side closest in the picture -- now the front side after the rotation), both pins had rusted/broken off and were only 18' tall. That doesn't do much good in 32' of water. So he pulled up the front pin and replaced it with a new 38' pin. Then he used the pin he pulled out and welded it to the top of the back pin to make it taller as well.

There have been several docks float off their pins and ended up loose out on the lake. Or the first section of walkway causes the dock to try and push away from the shore which causes the front of the dock to get hung up on the front pins - this has caused a lot of damage for many of the docks on the lake. This was the 3rd time this year that we've had to have repairs done to our dock because of the high water this summer.

I've been waiting for the water level to come down so I can pull our boat out to do some work on the motor. The last time we were out, it started running really rough and I was only able to get about 4000-4500 RPM while the engine sputtered a lot. I first thought maybe it was just bad fuel. But after getting back to our cove, I backed off to about 2000 RPM and the motor ran perfect. So I'm hoping it's just a clogged fuel filter. We don't have one of those large 10 micron fuel/water separators on our boat -- we just have the little fuel filter under the cowling. But to get to it (without risk of dropping tools in the water), I need to have the boat on the trailer. I'll also change the plugs while I'm at it as well. Hopefully that will take care of our problems with the boat. Our 2003 Yamaha 4-stroke 90 HP doesn't have a paper/disposable fuel filter -- it's got the type that you just clean it in solvent, dry it and reuse it.