I hope you feel better, now that you've expressed yourself.
Holding the boat off the dock with your legs is just asking for injury.
Place some fenders where they'll protect the boat. If you've got the money,
use those flexible poles to keep the boat away from the dock.

"Joe Blizzard" wrote in message
...
I live on the bank of Kanawha River in Winfield, WV and keep a 1977
Thunderbird S-18 docked there.

I was crawling around on my riverbank yesterday filling in some blank
spots in my rip rap, when a tsunami hit. I turned toward the dock and saw
my boat being slammed around violently and was genuinely concerned that it
might be damaged. Sometimes when I'm out there and I see a big wake, I'll
sit down on the dock and hold the boat off with my legs, but this was so
severe that I was afraid to get near it. At the time it seemed to last
forever, but my guess is the really violent part lasted for about 60
seconds. Fortunately nothing got broken. Except that there was now another
gash in my rip rap where the waves had rearranged some more of the rocks.

I get bounced around a lot at my dock, but I'd never seen anything quite
this bad. If there'd been any unsecured items or people in the boat, they
would have been in real danger of being thrown out. After the waves
settled down, I looked up river and saw the culprit, a big cruiser plowing
along at maximum wake speed, right up on my side of the river. That's
something I've seen a zillion times, so I really don't know what made this
particular incident so bad.

It's always the plowing cruisers. It's not strictly a size or speed thing.
Tugs pushing huge strings of barges don't rock my boat much. And we get
those long skinny offshore type boats (that are apparently propelled
entirely by noise) going by at ludicrous speed and they don't make that
big a wake. Even the cruisers when they're on plane don't seem to cause
much trouble.

I don't really know what my point was with all this, other than to bitch
about it.