Dredging your waterfront, what you need to know

This week we wanted to talk a little bit about dredging and a few key things you need to remember when dredging. Across the Gold Coast many waterfront owners will have seen or had the Gold Coast City Council contractors dredging canals, the council do this on about a 3 year cycle and despite what some people may think, they are not there to give you deeper water! There job is to pump sand back up against the retaining and revetment walls as these are the responsibility of the council in most cases.

However it is rare these days to hear about the council fronting money for damaged or collapsing walls despite them taking action to try and support them by pumping sand back against them. In most cases the sand is pumped up against the wall and then a down pour of rain days or weeks later comes through and washes it all down making your water front either very shallow or your pontoon beached in a lot of cases (mine included). We like to maintain at a minimum 300mm of water on the rear land side of your pontoon at all times, this allows for boat wash rocking the pontoon about and not having a ground strike.

Some of the side effects of a pontoon sitting on the ground at low tide are, it will pull piles over (away from house) it can break restraints/brackets and can even pull mounting brackets out of the wall for those with strut and cable pontoons. So there is nothing good about this scenario at all, in many cases, particularly people with insitu piles (the white ones) the piles will get past a certain point where they can’t be fixed as insitu piles cannot be removed and reinstalled like the concrete spun type can be.

When it comes time to dredge your water front give Aqua a call and we can arrange the whole process for you and achieve the best result, a misconception of dredging is that you can dredge as much as you want, this is very false.. Every canal has what is called a canal profile which is the gradient to which the canal can be dredged too, anymore than this can cause issues for neighboring properties and weaken retaining walls either side of your property.

Next time you require dredging give us a call on 1300 207 848 or email us