New Floating Docks for Boston’s Rowe’s Wharf

Located directly in front of Boston Harbor Hotel, Rowe’s Wharf provides docking space for multiple harbor cruise boats, dinner cruise boats and other small ferry boats that provide water transport and entertainment throughout the year in the Boston Harbor area. When the 1980s-era dock required replacement, Childs Engineering, the engineer for the project, specified Meeco Sullivan timber frame floating docks. Rowe’s Wharf owner Jones Lang LaSalle Americas Inc. awarded Semper Diving and Marine of Charlestown, Massachusetts, the dock replacement/installation contract.

Meeco Sullivan began building the docks in October 2019. Because the site has a two-mile fetch out of the southeast and large waves periodically hit Rowe’s Wharf, the company built extra-heavy timber frame docks with a 30-inch freeboard.

“The dock had to be built to withstand the wave action and the surges in the harbor, but also had to be able to fit tightly around the octagon-shaped pier structure,” said Josh Janek, project manager for Semper Driving and Marine.
Meeco Sullivan delivered the docks, which feature ipe decking, to the site in mid-January 2020. To minimize disruption to the ferry and leisure boats that use Rowe’s Wharf, Semper Diving and Marine took just two weeks to remove the old docks and install the new ones.

Janek said the dock sections were lifted by crane and stabbed onto the existing piles. The biggest challenge was ensuring that process would go smoothly. “There’s a 10-foot tide in Boston, and the piles may have been six inches off center with that tide change; it wasn’t the same at high tide and low tide,” he explained. Meeco Sullivan built oversized pile pockets to accommodate the difference, and after the initial installation, crews went in with pile rollers to shim the docks into place.

Semper Diving installed 18 different dock sections, the largest measuring 48 feet by 12 feet and weighing over 17,000 pounds. It completed all work within the required two-week timeframe.