Is your boat lift sinking in the muck?

We've had a lot of emails and phone calls lately asking if a MuckMat® will hold up a boat lift or shore station. The short answer is “yes!”

Once you’ve bought your nice new shore station, it’s a bummer to set it in the lake, only to watch one corner or more sink in the muck. Sometimes the whole boat lift sinks...bummer!

Then there’s the issue of walking around the shore station. It’s not very pleasant to sink past your knees in yucky muck while you’re putting in, or taking out your boat lift. Soft lake bottoms make installation and removal difficult, sometimes nearly impossible.

The MuckMat® is designed to prevent lake muck from moving sideways, creating a more solid base for both you and your boat lift. It’s like setting your shore station on a giant snowshoe.

The deal with muck, (or any soft soil) is it moves sideways when you step in it. Gravity simply wants you, or your shore station, more than it wants the muck because your specific gravity is greater. The muck sorta just slides out of the way and lets you sink.

The MuckMat® changes the equation by dispersing your weight, and trapping the muck in apertures (holes) in the MuckMat® geogrid so it can’t slide sideways...and “ta-da!” you and your boat lift don’t sink.

Each corner of your shore station holds up between 50 and 100 pounds on average, and if you weigh 180 pounds, each of your feet is holding up 90 pounds, if you’re standing still.

Of course, if you put a 2,000-pound boat on the lift, it adds another 500 pounds of weight to each corner of your lift. Depending on the density of your muck (some muck is yuckier than other muck) you may want to hedge your bets...

A MuckMat® geogrid is designed to hold 200 pounds per square foot. Assuming the pads on your shore station are about 2 square feet each, they should each hold about 400 pounds without sinking on a MuckMat®, unless you have extremely yucky muck.

What we do is simply add 18-inch round, flat patio stones under each foot of the boat lift, (on top of the MuckMat®) which just about doubles the carrying capacity to about 750 pounds for each corner, or about 3,000 pounds, total.

If you have a really heavy boat, or truly yucky muck, you can add two round patio stones, side-by-side, under each foot of your boat dock, (on top of the MuckMat®) which should increase total the load you can hold level up to around 5,000 to 6,000 pounds. If your boat weighs more than this...you probably won’t be using a shore station anyway, you’ll have your boat are a marina on Lake Michigan, or Bonita Springs, Florida.

There are lots of variables in your lake bottom soil, and we can do all the fancy calculating we want, but all this “cypherin’” (hillbilly term for “math”) is just estimating; you won’t know for sure until you get your boat lift in the water. But one thing’s for sure, a MuckMat®, (sometimes with patio stones) will definitely keep your boat lift from sinking in the muck!