Hull Cleaning, Dock & Seawall Divers in North Bay Village, FL

North Bay Island, dredged up in 1940, is mostly single-family homes with a dock on the bay behind each one, and that is where most of our village hull cleaning happens. Harbor Island, filled in the later 1940s, is mostly multi-family, so the work there is condo docks and long runs of seawall. Treasure Island splits the difference, with single-family homes on the west end and multi-family on the east, and street names lifted from Stevenson's novel.

The water around the 79th Street Causeway bridge is an idle-speed, no-wake zone, and Pelican Harbor Marina, the county marina off the causeway with 112 slips and a ramp with 125 trailer spaces, sits right next door. We clean boats there too. The whole village is ZIP 33141, and a diver can cover several docks on one island in a morning.

The village has open bay water on every side and no canals to hide in. That means warm salt water, steady tidal exchange and plenty of larvae looking for a hull. Boats that sit at a bayfront dock between weekends grow hard barnacles on props, shafts and rudders first, because bottom paint can't adhere to metal, and then a slime layer over the painted hull. Thirty days is the longest we let a village boat go between cleanings, and a hull with no bottom paint gets cleaned every two weeks.

Because the islands were dredged out of the bay, the whole shoreline is bulkhead and seawall, and the wall is what keeps each lot from going back to being bay bottom. Oyster growth on a village seawall is heavy, and it hides cracks that let sediment wash out from under a yard or a pool deck. We clean the wall, inspect it, document its condition ($250 for a home, $350 for a Harbor Island condo building) and fill cracks all the way through with custom cement tubes. The village has a 2-mile waterfront walkway, the Island Walk, under construction, so public seawall is getting attention here too.

Call 561-666-3716 or use the form and tell us which island the boat is on, its length and whether the hull is painted; for a seawall, say whether it is a house or a building. Nobody needs to be home: if the dock is behind a gate the divers call ahead and text you right before the visit, and the report and photos arrive after every visit.