Owners often ask how to anchor a floating dock so it can rise and fall with the water without drifting sideways. Balancing those two needs is what anchoring is really about, and there are three main ways to do it.
Pilings are posts driven into the bottom. The dock slides up and down them on hoops or rollers. This is a very stable approach for tidal water and marinas, but it needs a firm bottom and the right gear to install.
Cables, chains and anchors take a different route. Heavy anchors sit on the bottom and connect to the dock by cable or chain, and some setups cross the lines in an X pattern to cut down on side-to-side movement. This works well in deep water, where pilings would be very long. The lines need slack for the full tide, though, and the dock will usually move a bit more.
Stiff arms are rigid connectors that run from the dock to a seawall or the shore and pivot as the water changes. They give a tidy look and work for docks close to land in water that does not swing too much.
Water depth, the type of bottom, the tide range, wakes and dock size all push the choice one way or the other. In Florida, storm exposure matters a great deal as well. Seawalls need care too, since not every wall was built to take the extra push from a dock.
Supreme Floating Docks designs and installs floating docks across South Florida and plans the anchoring around each site, so the dock stays steady on calm days and rough ones.
