Waterfront Homework: Docks, Seawalls, Bridge Clearance

---

Most waterfront listings are written from the kitchen. The pool sparkles, the sunset faces the right way, and somewhere near the bottom you'll find the line that actually decides whether the house works for you: dock, seawall, bridges.

If you're buying on the water in South Florida, that line is the listing. Everything else is furniture. Here's the homework — the same five checks I run with my own buyers before anyone falls in love with a great room.

1. Frontage: the number everything hangs on

Water frontage is measured in feet, and it's the scarcest number in the deal. Frontage decides how much dock you can build, how big a boat can lie alongside, and how much of the water view is actually yours. Eighty feet is a working waterfront for most cruising boats; a point lot with frontage on two sides is a different animal entirely. Read the survey, not the brochure — and know that frontage, once you own it, is the one thing about the house you can never add to.

2. Depth at the dock face — at low tide

A canal can be fifteen feet deep at its center and four feet at your seawall. What matters is the water at the dock face, at low tide, where your boat will actually sit. 

The other end of the tide cycle matters just as much — what king tides reveal about a seawall, a lot, and a street: https://reedkellough.com/king-tides-and-flooding

Ask when the depth was last sounded and by whom. Shallow approaches don't disqualify a house — plenty of great waterfront homes suit shoal-draft boats beautifully — but they decide which boat the house fits, and you want that decided before closing, not at the first low tide.

3. The seawall: the invisible five-figure line item

The seawall is the house's foundation on the water side, and it has a lifespan. Ask its age, ask who built it, and look at the cap for cracking, the panels for bowing, and the tie-backs for corrosion. A wall near the end of its life is a five-figure replacement conversation.

The same high water that tests a seawall has a season and a calendar — the free King Tide Checklist walks the dates and the dock checks: https://reedkellough.com/king-tide-checklist

Price  a seawall inspection into your due diligence the way you'd price a roof inspection — a new wall and dock (the best-case listing line you'll read) removes a decade of worry; an original 1970s wall is a budget line, not a surprise, if you look before you buy.

4. The lift question

A dock without a lift keeps the boat in the water — fine for many owners, a maintenance rhythm for all of them. A lift keeps the hull dry, clean, and ready. If a listing has one, ask its capacity in pounds and check it against your boat's loaded weight, not its brochure weight. If it doesn't, confirm a lift can be permitted and powered on that frontage. Neither answer is wrong; the wrong answer is the one you discover after the wire clears.

5. Bridge clearance: the check nobody runs

This is the one that decides everything for a boat with any height to it — a flybridge, a tower, a sailboat mast. Between your dock and the inlet stands a series of bridges. The drawbridges open on request or on a schedule. The fixed bridges never open at all, and the lowest fixed bridge on your route sets your ceiling, forever.

The figure you need is the bridge's closed clearance at mean high water — your boat's air draft has to fit under it, with margin, on the day the tide is high and the boat is light. On this stretch of the Intracoastal, the clearances run from about 15 feet at the Pompano spans (NE 14th Street, Atlantic Boulevard, Commercial Boulevard) up to 21 feet at Hillsboro Boulevard — and farther south in Boca, the Camino Real bridge clears just 9 to 10 feet, the lowest on the stretch. Two houses with identical docks can be in entirely different boating universes because of one span of concrete between them and the ocean.

When a listing says "no fixed bridges," that's not decoration — it's the most valuable three words a boating buyer can read. It means the route to the inlet is drawbridges only, and the boat behind the house is limited by the boat, not the road.

I keep the whole table in one place: eleven Intracoastal bridges between Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale, every closed clearance, and what the numbers mean for boats at 12, 17, and 23 feet of air draft. It's free — the Bridge-Clearance Cheat Sheet, drawn from published U.S. Coast Guard and NOAA references: reedkellough.gumroad.com/l/lfprk. Run your boat against your route before you run an offer up the flagpole. (And confirm any clearance on VHF Channel 9 with the bridge tender before a first transit — tables are homework, tenders are the final word.)

The order of operations

Survey for the frontage. Sounding for the depth. Inspection for the seawall. Pounds for the lift. And the bridge table for the route. Five checks, none of them expensive, all of them cheaper than the lesson. Do the waterfront homework first, and the house you fall for will be one your boat can actually live behind.

Shopping during boat-show season? The waterfront listings and showing plan for FLIBS week live here: https://reedkellough.com/flibs-boat-show

I'm Reed Kellough, a Douglas Elliman agent (Eklund|Gomes Team) in Lighthouse Point — 200+ closings · 14 years on this coast, most of them waterfront. If you're looking at a dock and want a second set of eyes on the water behind the house, call or text me at (954) 242-0441. And a standing note: I'm licensed in Florida only, but I keep a national network of vetted relocation specialists and referral partners — if your move starts with a sale in another state, or takes you somewhere else entirely, I'm glad to connect you with the right agent there. Help first, always.