St. Vincent's Pavilion: Dock and Marine Wall

Barefoot Marine Construction built the dock and marine wall at the St. Vincent’s pavilion in Jacksonville.

The photograph shows the covered pavilion from inside: an exposed timber roof structure, wide plank decking, and open sides looking out over the water.

Two structures, one project

This job combined two things that usually get quoted separately — a dock, and the marine wall protecting the shoreline it connects to. Building them together is normally the better outcome, for two reasons that have nothing to do with price.

The first is the tie-in. Where a dock meets a wall there is a joint, and that joint is where water, soil and movement all concentrate. When the two structures are designed together, the tie-in gets designed. When they are built years apart by different contractors, it gets worked around — and a worked-around tie-in is the detail most likely to be the first thing to fail.

The second is disturbance. Marine construction means barges, equipment and access across a shoreline that is usually someone’s lawn, car park or frontage. Doing it once costs less in site damage, restoration and disruption than doing it twice, and on a commercial site it means one coordination exercise instead of two.

The covered structure

An open-sided roof over water is governed by uplift rather than by its own weight — wind moving under and across it lifts, and the load path from roof covering through framing and connections into the piles has to carry that at every joint. The reasoning is set out on our gazebos and covered structures page, and it is why the piles get settled before the roof.

Commercial waterfront

Institutional waterfront brings requirements a residential back yard does not. The marine scope has to fit around everything else happening on the site, the structure serves a public setting rather than one family, and the documentation and coordination standards are those of a commercial project. It is representative of the work we do for commercial, municipal and military clients across Northeast Florida.

If you are weighing a wall and a dock as separate jobs, the page on bulkheads versus seawalls is worth reading first — the two words describe different structures, and which one your shoreline needs changes the scope considerably.