Bolles School Crew Complex: Boathouse, Dock Walkway and Floating Launch

Barefoot Marine Construction built the boathouse, dock walkway and floating launch dock at the Bolles School crew complex on the St. Johns River in Jacksonville.

It is a useful project to look at because it contains almost everything a covered waterfront structure can ask for, in one place: a long walkway reaching out to navigable water, a covered pavilion with open sides and a substantial roof, boat lifts working under that cover, and a floating dock that has to stay usable across the river’s full tidal range.

What the structure has to do

A rowing programme puts different demands on a dock than a family with a centre console. Shells are long, light and awkward, they are carried by hand, and they are launched by a crew standing on the dock rather than lowered on a lift. That pushes the design toward a low freeboard floating dock — close enough to the water that a shell can be set on it and stepped into — and toward generous deck width, because people are moving along it in both directions with twenty feet of boat on their shoulders.

The floating launch does that job. Because it floats, its height above the water does not change as the tide does, which on the St. Johns matters: a fixed dock set at a good height at high water is a long drop at low water, and the reverse at the other end of the range. A float sidesteps the problem entirely.

The roof is a wind problem first

The covered pavilion is the part of this project most likely to be underestimated. A roof of that size over open water is an uplift problem before it is a shading problem. Wind moving across and under an open-sided structure lifts it; the load path from roof covering down through framing, connections and piles has to be continuous and rated for that uplift at every joint. A strong roof fixed to weak connections is a roof that leaves.

The piles beneath it carry considerably more than the structure’s own weight for the same reason. This is the reasoning set out in more detail on our boathouse construction and gazebos and covered structures pages, and it is why the pile question gets settled before the roof design does, not after.

Boat lifts under cover

The boathouse interior shows lifts working beneath the roof structure. Combining the two is the right call when a vessel lives at the dock year-round — the lift takes the hull out of the water, which stops growth and slows corrosion, and the roof keeps sun and rain off everything the lift has raised. But it does mean the covered structure’s framing and the lift’s own loads are being carried by the same piles, and both have to be accounted for together rather than added later.

Working on an institutional site

This is commercial waterfront work on a school campus, which brings requirements a residential project does not have: the marine scope has to fit around everything else happening on the site, the structure serves a programme rather than one household, and the documentation and coordination standards are those of a commercial job. That is the kind of work described on our commercial and municipal page.