Peter J. Morse
Calais, VT
A woman that I work for asked if I could replace her aging, floating dock with a new one. I told her that I would install one on pilings and that I would do it while the ice was on the pond.
Now it may sound absurd to attempt such a project in the dead of winter, but look at the advantages: If you are making a new dock, you have a nice big frozen drawing board to lay it out on. Instead of standing up to your chest in water while wielding a sledgehammer or worse yet, floating around in a boat trying to do the same; you can use an ice-fishing auger to bore several holes and have a solid surface upon which to stand while driving in the pilings. For the same reason, framing around the posts will be simple, with a flat and level place to set your planks. And lastly, any sawdust made, particularly chain-sawdust, can easily be swept up and taken off the pond. Try that in the summertime.
I actually didn't get to my task until the 18th of March. With the ice still eight inches thick and the water barely 3 feet deep at that location, it was still plenty safe. An earlier date would have saved me from removing several inches of snow, but a snowscoop made short work of that.
The old dock was shaped like a hammer, sort of like a raft with a floating walkway. It still had to be taken from the site so I began by tearing up the floorboards. As I had expected (and one good friend had doubted) there was open water beneath the raft. The wooden frame had formed a barrier against the ice and the unmelted snow had insulated everything. With the resistance of the flooring gone I was able to tear the framing free of the surrounding ice. I had some difficulty freeing a couple of the walkway barrels, due to their having taken on water and the edges of the ice had latched onto them. Because they were black plastic, just having them exposed to the sun for the next few days allowed me to extract them.
The next step was to drive sharpened cedar posts down into the thick clay that keeps most ponds from just seeping into the ground. The posts were arrayed around the edge of the ice, following the shape of the former dock. Most went in well with just the use of the sledgehammer, others closer to shore required starting with an iron bar.
A week passed before the next phase, while I waited for the mill to saw up the cedar lumber I needed. With a sled full of tools and a power cord for my saw running from the camp to the pond's edge, I ringed the posts with a 2X6 framework then chainsawed off the excess post. I put a three inch shim under each plank to keep the future dock slightly off the water (something which has not been a problem in this summer of drought) and because water finds its own level, every 2X6 plank was level.
I applied a new floor of one inch cedar, starting diagonally at one corner on shore. I let each board hang over in a saw-toothed pattern then trimmed them all at once to within an inch of the framing. Every piece of wood I didn't use came off the ice more easily than floating scraps would. The entire project, from dock extraction to cutting down cedar pilings, from trucking the lumber to asembling the new dock took only 32 hours. And this in weather that rarely reached out of the 30's. Besides docks I can see bridges, boathouses even boats themselves being put together on a frozen body of water and allowed to settle into place come spring. I would like to see other builders making use of what is traditionally a slow time of year by turning the ice into a workshop.
