Some advise from another river boater. Whips. I have tried lots of bumpers,
and riggings to protect my 21' bow rider. Whips are the best.
I noticed the same thing, bow high cruisers.
I get very aggravated with there arrogance. My dock is just up from a
marina. (If you can call it that it is just a mess of docks stuck in the
river.) They will be on the radio yelling at every passing boat to slow
down, but as soon as they leave the "marina" they are bow high and to hell
with everyone else. I think they should either learn to tie there boats to
avoid damage or rent a slip in a sheltered marina.
We had one guy come out of the marina go up about 1/2 mile and start to do
donuts so his kids could have some good waves to jump with there jet skis.
His Boston Whaler dingy was bigger than my boat. There are more private
docks than marina docks. Maybe we should all go take a few spins around the
marina. I bet all us combined could make the wake of one of there boats.
Anyway I feel your pain.

"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.