The dock removal season playbook
Fall is the season with the hard deadline: ice picks the finish date and won’t tell you which one. Here’s the whole removal season in one piece — settling the list, working lake by lake, budgeting the wind, and billing while the truck is still wet.
· 7 min read
Spring has a moving start and a soft finish. Fall is the opposite: the start is whenever you decide, and the finish is decided for you, by ice, on a date nobody will tell you in advance. Every removal season that turns chaotic does so the same way — the list wasn’t settled, the boats chased phone calls instead of water, and the wind ate days nobody had budgeted.
Here’s the whole fall in one piece: settle the customer list before the first pull, turn it into a backlog instead of a route, work one lake at a time, budget the wind before it blows, and bill each job the day it closes. The rest of this post takes those in order.
Settle the list before the water tells you to
Fall arrangements are their own thing, separate from spring — often covering different equipment, because plenty of customers have you pull the lift and handle the swim raft themselves. So the first job of September is one pass over that list: who’s still with you, who sold the cabin, who called in July to add a canopy.
In LakeOps that pass is the rollover screen — every standing fall arrangement, ticked by default, with when that work was last done next to each. Untick the ones who are gone, write the reason, and generate. One job per customer appears, every piece listed, all of it pending, all of it on the map. Nobody re-types October.
Build a backlog, not a route
A removal route built in September is fiction by the second week of October. The wind doesn’t read it, the crane breaks down on the wrong day, and a customer calls to say the boat’s already out of the water so take the lift whenever. Don’t build the route. Build the pile, and point boats at it.
Nothing in the pile is assigned to anyone. When a boat goes out, it’s pointed at a lake and a stretch of shoreline, and it takes whatever is waiting there. A killed afternoon costs you the afternoon — there’s nothing to reschedule, because nothing was scheduled. That model is argued in full in the install-season version of this post, and it matters more in fall, because fall is the season with the hard deadline.
Work one lake at a time
A boat works one lake per day — barges launch at an access, and a lake-to-lake move is a day, not a detour. So the sequencing question isn’t “which customer is next”, it’s “which water is next”. Two things should decide it: where ice arrives first, and what gear the remaining work needs. Shallow, sheltered bays freeze weeks before deep open shorelines, so the back of the bay outranks the point even when the point calls more often.
The map answers the gear half. Each property shows what it takes to finish it — if four places on one lake need the crane barge, that’s the boat to send, and that’s a day. Clustered pins are a day’s work; scattered pins on the same water are a different kind of day.
Budget the wind before it blows
Count backward from the earliest realistic ice date on your hardest lake, and be honest about what a week holds. Six working days a week is a spring number. In October you’ll lose days to wind, half-days to weather that turns at lunch, and daylight shrinks all month. If the list takes twenty boat-days flat out, it takes twenty boat-days plus the days the weather keeps — and those come out of the calendar whether you planned them or not.
A backlog absorbs this. The killed day ends with a tap and a reason, the finished pieces stay finished, and tomorrow’s boat gets pointed at the same shoreline minus whatever got done. When the wind closes the west shore at ten in the morning, you move the boat to water that’s workable — not back to the office to rebuild a plan.
The crew’s day, briefly
The day loads onto the phone at the landing and works past the last bar of signal. The person who pulls a piece marks that piece — the dock, then the lift, then the canopy — and records where each one is stacked for the winter, so spring doesn’t start with a search party. A property left part-done reads as part-done on everyone’s map, which is the handoff, made visible.
Bill while the truck is still wet
The gap between finishing work and asking to be paid for it is where fall money goes to die — the customer leaves the lake, the office gets busy, and the ask slides to month-end. Close the job at the dock instead. The customer gets an email the same hour, listing every piece that came out, with the crew’s photos and what it comes to. What’s owed then ages from that day, so come December you know exactly who’s paid and who needs a nudge.
When the last boat is on the trailer
Collect the stragglers, pull the season’s numbers while the memory is fresh — minutes per piece, the days the wind took, which lake paid best — and then close the season. A closed fall is next year’s answer key: what every customer was worth, what every shoreline costs, written down where March can find it.