The words this trade uses

Two vocabularies collide in this business. There is the one the trade has used for fifty years, which nobody writes down because everybody on the boat already knows it, and there is the one a piece of software imposes, which is usually borrowed from an industry that works on land.

This page is both. The first half is the trade's, for anybody who has just hired on or just bought the company. The second is ours, so that when a page on this site says "service plan" you can find out exactly what we mean before you decide whether to believe the rest of it.

The words the trade uses

Ice-out

The day a lake is clear enough of ice to put a boat on it. It is not a date — it moves as much as three weeks year to year on the same lake, and it is what the entire install season is measured from. Neighbouring lakes of different depths can open a week apart.

Ice-in

The freeze that closes the season. The last two weeks before it are the ones that decide whether a removal list gets finished, because a lift left in the water when the ice sets is a claim rather than a job.

Sectional dock

A dock built from rigid sections that bolt together on legs, carried in and out piece by piece. Common on hard bottoms and shallow water. It is the reason a single property can be four separate amounts of work — sections, legs, decking and the canopy over it.

Roll-in dock

A dock on wheels that is pushed into the water and pulled back out as one unit. Faster than a sectional on the right shoreline and impossible on the wrong one — it needs a gradual, hard bottom and a way to get a truck or a winch to it.

Floating dock

A dock held up by encapsulated flotation rather than by legs on the bottom. It follows a changing water level, which is why it is common where a lake is drawn down, and it is usually anchored rather than set.

Crib dock

A permanent dock built on stone-filled timber cribs on the lake bed. It does not come out, which is why a crib property is a repair and inspection customer rather than a seasonal one.

Boat lift

A cradle that raises a boat clear of the water. Cantilever, vertical and hydraulic are the usual kinds, and which one a property has decides what gear the crew needs aboard to service it.

Shore station

Another name for a boat lift, used for the whole assembly of lift, bunks or cradle and canopy. Common in the upper Midwest.

Canopy

The fabric roof over a lift. It is a separate piece from the lift under it: it has its own frame, its own storage footprint on shore, and it is the piece most often left off in a wind.

Bunks and cradle

What the boat actually rests on inside a lift. Set to the hull, so a customer who changed boats over the winter is a job that takes longer than the schedule says.

PWC port

A drive-on float for a personal watercraft, either standalone or hung off a dock. Small, and easy to forget on a removal list, which is why it belongs in the property inventory as its own piece.

Wheel kit

The wheels that make a roll-in dock roll. A property whose wheel kit has seized is not a normal install; it is a repair discovered at the worst possible moment.

Staging

Where the pieces sit on shore between seasons. Every piece has one, and getting it wrong costs a crew twenty minutes of walking on a property they have never been to.

Drawdown

A deliberate lowering of a lake or reservoir, usually over winter. It changes what depth a lift has to be set at and can strand a dock that was fine last year.

Riparian rights

The rights of a shoreline owner to use the water in front of their property, including placing a dock. They are what a dock permit sits on, and they vary by state, province and sometimes by lake.

Exposure

Which way a shoreline faces, and therefore which wind closes it. A north wind closes a south-facing bay first; the calm side of the same lake may be perfectly workable the same morning. It is the single most useful fact about a stretch of shoreline and almost no software records it.

The words LakeOps uses

Fewer than you would expect, and each one is a decision. The whole model is six nouns.

Property

One shoreline address, with its own pin on the water side rather than the road side, and the pieces that belong to it.

Item

One physical piece at a property — a dock, a lift, a canopy, a PWC port — with the point in the water where it goes, the point on shore where it stacks, and its own notes and photographs. Items retire when they are sold; they are never deleted, because a sold lift still owns years of history.

Service plan

The standing arrangement with a customer: these items, this service, every season. It is the thing that revolves. It is not a job.

Season

One spring or one fall. Generating a season turns every active service plan into that season's jobs, once.

Job

One occurrence of work at one property in one season. A job never recycles: finishing it does not queue anything, and next season's generation run creates next season's job.

Job item

One piece within one job. It carries its own status, its own completion time, its own notes and its own photographs — which is why "two of the three were done" is a thing the system can say, and why the bill matches it.

Zone

A named stretch of shoreline on a lake. Dispatch is by zone, and a property's zone is recorded when it is saved rather than worked out from a map at run time.

Deployment

A boat, a crew and a set of zones for one day. It is not a route and not a schedule: the crew takes whatever is still open in those zones.

Day pack

Everything a crew needs for the day, downloaded to the phone before they leave — the stops, the pins, the access notes, the reference photographs. It is what makes a bad-signal day a bad-signal day rather than a wasted one.

The two words we deliberately do not have

There is no appointment and there is no invoice. Neither is an omission. A season decided by ice and wind cannot be held in appointments, and a job that prices itself and emails a pay link the moment it is finished does not need an invoice object to be collectable. Both are argued at length in what LakeOps does not do.