The tired boards are rarely the whole story

Look where the dock does the work

Boards go grey in Florida whether anything is wrong or not, so a grey deck tells you very little on its own. What tells you something is where the dock has been carrying weight. On this canal grid a dock is a working surface: gear goes down it every trip, the boat leans on the tie up edge in whatever the wind is doing that day, and if there is a lift, the well and the boards around it live next to a machine picking up a loaded hull.

So the walk goes in that order. The tie up edge first, and the stringers under it, where a heavy hull has spent its life quietly nudging the structure. Then the lift well and its cutouts, where board ends and frame ends sit in an opening that stays wet. Then the run of walkway between the seawall and the water, which takes every cooler, every cart and every guest who ever visited. Last, the pilings at the waterline, because salt does its work down there whether or not your canal ever gets rough, and a dock deep in the grid gets no more protection from that than one sitting out front of the harbor.

Then you get one of three answers and the why behind each: repair a soft section and leave the good work alone, strip the deck and lay fresh boards on a frame that is still sound, or start below the water, because new decking over a failing frame buys appearance and nothing else. Alex does that sounding with you walking beside him, free, and points at what he is reading as he goes. We come up by water, a barge run north across the top of the harbor, and the old boards leave on the barge when we go.