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How My Friend Almost Lost His Fishing Boat

If you are an experienced boater, you probably understand the importance of having a good boat dock bumper. But even knowledgeable boaters who are used to fishing on glassy lakes might not see the significance of a good boat dock bumper, but this information should help you come to a better realization of the need for one.

A friend of mine has a modest private boat dock in a medium-sized lake in Michigan where he keeps his boat. The water is usually relatively calm there, so he just uses simple boat dock bumpers: a little bit of boat dock foam and a few old tires. Well, let’s say he used to do that until the big storm came along. That eye-opener changed his thinking pretty quickly.

One day I was out with him near the center of the lake when the tempest hit and it came fast and furious without warning. All of a sudden, the water darkened, the waves rose ever higher, and the wind raged into a gale. It was among the roughest landings that we ever experienced. It took nearly an hour of tacking to and fro with lightning on the verge of striking, before we were able to dock the boat. But things only got worse from there.

Rather than the thud of the boat striking the boat dock bumper that I expected, I heard a crash instead. The boat jolted, and I leaned over to take a peek at the side of it. I found a hole in the side of the hull where the boat dock bumper was supposed to be. It had been broken off in the storm.

Thanks to the absent boat dock bumper, my buddy almost lost his fishing boat that day. It instantly began to fill up with water. The water from the rain and the lake kept gushing into the side. Hurriedly, I tied it on to the peer the best I could. I wasn’t for certain if it would stay, but I was certain that we had to get out of the boat immediately, or else I would go under with it. The storm was threatening everywhere.

Fortunately, he was able to salvage the boat, but. Since almost all the boat dock bumpers had come off, the hull was severely gouged during the storm. Understand that ordinarily a good boat dock bumper would buffer a boat as it swayed backward and forward against the pier. Certainly, it would be bruised and beaten-up some, maybe scraped and chipped, but on the whole a storm would induce minimal damage if the boat dock bumper was intact. That was what it was fashioned for, after all. A boat dock bumper is there to protect your boat as well as your dock.

So, keep this in mind. A boat dock bumper is one place you don’t want to skimp if you don’t have to. It’s bad enough to do damage to your boat; you can get another one of those. But you can’t get another you if you go down with your ill-equipped boat.