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The pilings under the old Bremerton ferry dock told me more than any class did
I was up in Bremerton last month helping on an inspection job under the old ferry dock and the pilings down there stopped me cold. You can see the tide line clear as day, and above it the creosote is still black and solid, but right at the splash zone the wood is chewed down to a pencil in spots. It's the crabs and the isopods and whatever else is grinding on it, plus the wet-dry cycle hammering it twice a day. What got me is how uneven it is. One piling looked fine from the surface but two feet down it was hollow, and my probe went through like it was balsa. The old timer running the job said they'd wrapped some of them in fiberglass years back and those sections were still holding up great. I've been diving a while and I still learn something every time I get under a structure that's been sitting in salt water for decades. Any of you run into wrap or jacket failures that looked good until you were right up on them?
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sarahhart12d ago
Watched a guy swear by those fiberglass wraps on a dock down in Anacortes until I got right up on one and the edge had lifted just enough for salt water to creep under. The wrap still looked smooth and gray from three feet away, but the wood underneath was mush and you could poke a screwdriver into the gap. Learned right then that a jacket only works if the seal stays tight, and the splash zone is exactly where it won't. Used to figure wrap was the easy fix for old pilings, now I'd rather see it pulled off and checked than trust how it looks.
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