Who we are
Barefoot Marine Construction is a Jacksonville-based marine contractor working the waterfront of Northeast Florida. We were founded in 2009 by Rick Powell, who remains Founder & CEO, and we have been working this coast ever since.
We are a Certified General Contractor — Florida licence #1533461 — which matters more in this trade than it might sound. Marine structures are structural work, and the parts that determine whether a wall or a dock survives are the parts nobody can see after handover.
Rick Powell brings 30+ years of experience in the trade to every job the company takes on.
Why the insurance matters
We carry Workers' Compensation and USL&H — Longshore & Harbor Workers' coverage. USL&H is a federally mandated requirement for employers whose workers do maritime-adjacent work that falls outside traditional state workers' compensation. It is written under the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, administered by the U.S. Department of Labor, and it is a separate scheme from state cover rather than an addition to it — the boundary between the two runs roughly along the water's edge.
This is not a technicality. If a contractor is working over your water carrying only state workers' compensation, the exposure for an injury can land with the property owner. It is a reasonable question to ask any marine contractor bidding your job, and the answers vary more than people expect. Ask us and we will show you current certificates.
We have written the whole thing up — what the Act covers, the two tests that decide whether a worker falls under it, and what to ask for on a certificate — in our guide to USL&H insurance.
How we work
Diagnosis before scope
The things that decide a marine structure's future are underwater, underground, or inside it. Embedment below the mudline. Tieback condition. Voids behind a wall. Pile section below the waterline. An estimate written from a walk along the top of a cap is a guess, and we have been called to fix enough of other people's guesses to take this seriously. We look first.
We will tell you not to do the work
Our estimates are free, which means telling you your wall has years left in it costs us nothing except a job we should not have sold you. We would rather be the contractor you call in four years than the one who talked you into something now.
Sequence matters as much as method
A great deal of failed marine repair is the right work done in the wrong order — filling voids behind a wall that is still leaking, or patching spalled concrete over steel that is still corroding. Both look finished. Both come back.
Who we work for
Residential, commercial, municipal and military clients across the First Coast.
Our work includes the dock and marine wall at the St. Vincent's pavilion in Jacksonville — see projects and our commercial and municipal page.
What we do
About eighty percent of our work is in three areas: bulkheads, seawalls and dock construction. The rest — pile work, boathouses and lifts, erosion control, inspections, permitting and marina maintenance — mostly supports those three. The full list is here.
Where we work
Duval, Clay, St. Johns and Nassau counties. Being local matters here: exposure, tidal range, soils and storm behaviour vary a lot across these four counties, and we have been repairing structures through all of it since 2009.
What clients say
We do not write our own testimonials. Everything on our reviews page is lifted word for word from our Google Business Profile — including the long ones, and the ones describing work another contractor got wrong before we arrived.