Burlington Free Press: Dock Returns to Community Sailing Center

Burlington Free Press Article – June 26,2008
by: Allison Bryant

A 200-foot-long dock installed at the Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center in August 2003 provided patrons with transient boat-docking space and protection from large waves. That is, until it sank during a storm in late September 2005.

The dock, built with the assistance of a federal Boating Infrastructure Grant administered by the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, served the center for only two seasons. The structure was salvaged on New Year’s Day of 2006 and stored on land for repairs.

Living without the dock was not easy for the sailing center, said Fritz Horton, a member of the Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center board of directors.

“It was very challenging because we had a narrow dock, 10 feet by 70, that replaced a whole dock system,” Horton said. “It was just a boy doing a man’s job.”

The sailing center was forced to curtail its programs for lack of dock space.

Now, with efforts of volunteers and the board of directors, the old dock with a new design will return to its post on the water today.

“We’ve been working with volunteers every weekend since February,” Horton said. “They come because they either really believe in what we do or they want to be a part of what we call the mates program.”

The mates program offers unlimited sailing lessons and rentals for the season in exchange for at least 40 hours of service to the sailing center. Sixty people volunteered to work on the dock during the past few months and about 25 participated in the mates program, said Colin Davis, program director at the Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center. The structure of the dock is steel, but the deck portion is wood, so most volunteers worked on the carpentry aspect, he said.

“Volunteers have been helping to cut lumber, put it into place and fasten it together,” Davis said. “A dock of that size, there’s a lot of little screws to get turned and when you have 10 hands turning screws, it goes a lot faster.”
At least two to four people turned out to help each weekend, but sometimes the numbers reached 10 or 12, Horton said. The sailing center also hired a welder to repair the steel portions of the dock, which accounts for most of the expense, he said.

Much of the dock has been re-engineered, Horton said. The structure was split into four sections and reinforced considerably.

“A large part of what we hope will be the success of this new system will be resilient connectors and moorings,” Horton said.

When the dock sank, it took the insurance company a year to pay, Horton said. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast a month before the sailing center lost the dock, so Horton said the insurance company might have been overwhelmed with claims, causing the delay.

Insurance provided about $155,000, the center and the federal grant covered the rest of the $355,000 project, Horton said.

“We sort of fell under the radar,” Horton said.

The insurance company paid for some of the repairs, but waiting for reimbursement proved troublesome for the sailing center.

“It was just painful going through two summers without this dock while we wrestled over getting reimbursement from the insurance company,” Horton said.

During those two seasons, the sailing center experienced a fairly significant growth in the number of patrons, Davis said. That caused difficulty in terms of launching boats and coordinating the movement of people on and off the water, he said.

“It’s almost like air traffic control down there,” Davis said. “That whole conjunction of people moving around on the dock space is the biggest challenge.”

When the repaired and improved dock returns to the water via crane today, these problems will be no more, Davis said. The structure provides more physical space for boats, protects the launch area and provides a safe harbor when wind from the west or northwest creates swells, he said.

The sailing center will reconfigure the existing docks and make several changes to accommodate the new main dock, Horton said. Programs initially suspended due to limited dock space will return, he said.

“We’re already planning it,” Horton said. “We’ve already sold the programs. They’ve already been fully subscribed.”

It will take a large crane and a good portion of the morning to install the dock, Horton said.