Tips For Chosing The Perfect Boat Dock Bumper

If you are a boater, especially one accustomed to sailing on smooth waters, you might not understand how important a boat dock bumper is. I have a small private pier where I keep my boat in a mid sized lake in Michigan. Usually the water is calm, and so we only use the most basic boat dock bumpers. A little bit of boat dock foam and a few old tires, we figured, was more than enough. That was before the big storm hit. Things have not been the same since.

I was out in the middle of the lake when the storm hit, seemingly from out of nowhere. All at once, the water turned dark, the waves grew higher and higher, and the wind grew into a gale. It was one of the roughest landings that I ever had. It took us nearly an hour of tacking back and forth with lightning threatening to strike, before we were able to get in to the dock. The problem is that, once we did, things got worse.

Instead of the thump of the boat landing against the boat dock bumper that I expected, what I heard was a crash. The boat jarred, and I leaned over to look at the side. There was a hole in the side of the hull where the boat dock bumper should have been. It wasn't there. It had been knocked off in the storm.

Because of the missing boat dock bumper, I almost lost my ship that day. It immediately started to fill with water. The rain and the lake kept pouring into the side. Hastily, I tied it on to the peer as well as I could. I wasn't sure if it would keep, but I knew that I had to get off of the boat soon, or else I would go down with it. The storm was threatening all around.

Well, it turns out that the boat was salvageable. Because most of the boat dock bumpers had fallen off, the hull was badly gouged during the storm. You see, normally a good boat dock bumper would cushion it as it rocked back and forth against the pier. Sure, it would be bruised and battered a little bit, maybe scratched and chipped, but all in all a storm would cause very little damage if the boat dock bumper was intact. That was what it was designed for, after all. A boat dock bumper is there to protect your boat as well as your dock.