Brief

Frensham Pond Sailing Club have a number of jetties in various stages of decay after years of providing access to the lake. This was to be the first of their replacements, a 30m long narrow, wooden structure that hugged the surface of the water, but was beginning to collapse at one end. Other than the safety issue, it had always been fit for purpose, so the club wanted us to do a direct replacement in more hard-wearing material.

Solution

The aesthetics of the design wasn’t in question, so all we had to do was measure the existing structure and replicate it. We then built aluminium framed box sections back at base and transported them to the site where we installed and clad them in composite decking. Finally, to finish off the look, we added Frensham Pond’s very own design of fender – an old ship’s mooring rope. This massive, 10cm diameter rope is only safe to hold a ship for a limited amount of time, and the sailing club had bought it to recycle it, hoping to give it a second life protecting more, albeit smaller, boats. We bolted it all around the aluminium frame in such a way that, should this rope stretch, the bolts can simply be tightened to take up the slack.

Challenges

This jetty was an example of a job that went exactly as expected from start to finish. There were no surprises in terms of the hardness of the lake-bed, the environment or the depth of the water. The weather was calm and bright, access was straightforward and we were able to bring the trailer close to the site using the existing slipway. We had the old jetty removed in two and a half hours, and almost exactly twenty-four hours later, the new one was in place. The hard-wearing composite and aluminium will provide the next generation of sailors with safe, maintenance-free access to their boats for decades to come.