The Breakwater

With the docks turned perpendicular to the shoreline, it was much easier to maintain the docks, but the ones on the outside were left very vulnerable to the wind. We had tried building an uncovered pontoon dock with sheets of steel hanging from the side as a breakwater dock, but the waves were continually causing structural problems with the dock. There were some exotic and very expensive concrete ones going in at Lake of the Ozarks, but we couldn't afford one of those. I contacted the Corps of Engineers, and they sent me some information on a study done by Goodyear on floating tire breakwaters... all pretty much built from salvage materials.

Phil Petars, our mechanic, was like the "King of Salvage" in the area. He started saving scrap tires. Whenever he was by a tire shop and saw a pile of old tires he would pick them up. Quite often they would pay him to haul them off. He piled tires along the driveway into his house until there was no room left. I got some used short pieces of cable from my Springfield connection and a bunch of used cable clamps, and we were in business.

We built the breakwater in 8-foot wide by 30-foot long sections on Phil's big homemade flat bed trailer. Phil,  Dad and I worked all winter weaving together eight rows of tires with 5/8" cable, and by the spring of 1982 we had completed a 300-foot long breakwater!

The remaining floating tire breakwater.

Of course, anything put together with steel cable and placed in the water is not going to last forever. We have had to rebuild the breakwater twice since that original one was built. What a labor intensive project that is. The last time we rebuilt it we used stainless steel cable--hoping that would last longer--but no one told us, including the dock builders, that you can't use galvanized clamps on stainless cable. Those two metals don't do well together when placed in the water. We have since replaced all the bad clamps, and in 2012 we removed a portion of the tire breakwater that was bad and replaced it with the first phase of the future breakwater: a floating steel breakwater dock.

The breakwater dock; aka the "600 dock."

The 600 dock is currently used for nightly dock rentals so as the demand for additional nightly slips increases we will extend the dock to replace more tire sections.

Written by Cap'n T. Morgan