Every spring, before the first tropical wave rolls off the Yucatan, walk the entire waterfront with a checklist and a camera. Start at the dock. Press every board with a heel and look for soft spots, popped stainless screws working proud of the surface, loose cleats, and any nail that has backed itself out of the planking. Pull up on every piling cap and confirm the bolt is still seated. Lift the lift canopy and lay eyes on the cables, the bunks, and the motor box — anything that has frayed, cracked, or saltwater-crusted gets noted now, not in August. A two-hour pre-season pass is the difference between a clean reopening after the first blow and a Tuesday spent on the phone with the insurance adjuster. Small monthly beats repair — every season, on every shoreline we walk.
Then walk the bulkhead. Read the sheets. Telltale signs of storm vulnerability are not subtle if you know where to look: bowing sheets that lean toward the water, daylight visible through the seam between two sheets, soft spots at the cap where a boot heel sinks, standing water behind the wall that never drains, mangled piling tops where an old storm scraped the concrete, weakened or slack lift cabling on neighboring lifts, and any soil line that has crept above the top of the cap. A single daylight seam in the wrong place can cost you ninety feet of yard in a Category 3. A single soft spot at the cap can cost you the back patio. Find these in March; do not find them in September.
The honest line between a homeowner fix and a contractor call is this. Homeowner fix: a popped screw, a loose cleat, a wiggled bolt, a cracked piling cap, a hose-rinse of the lift cradle. Contractor fix: anything you can see daylight through, anything that has bowed, anything that has shifted since last season, anything that needs a cofferdam or a barge, anything a barefoot grandchild could find with a stick. Our bulkhead-construction crew handles new vinyl and timber walls, cap rebuilds, drainage corrections, and tie-back replacements — the work that does not survive a homeowner repair attempt. Our storm-damage-repair crew is the one you call after the storm clears: sheet replacement, cap and piling restoration, lift retrieval, debris haul-off, and the documentation your adjuster actually wants.
Pick the date for the walk now — put it on the calendar the same way you put the roof inspection on it. Walk it with the camera. Save the photos in a folder named for the year and the property. If something on the walk makes you pause, send us the photo and a one-line note and we will tell you which side of the line it falls on. The goal is not to find nothing. The goal is to find it in March, on your terms, with a contractor of your choosing — not in September, in the rain, with whoever answered the phone first. When you are ready to schedule the walk or want a second set of eyes on something you already saw, use the form on the home page and we will get back to you the same day.