Twin Cities Docks and Lifts, your FLOE dock and boat lift dealer

Ice-out on our lakes is usually the first half of April, and docks go in from ice-out through the fishing opener. Forest Lake and Bald Eagle open up first because they’re shallower; White Bear and Big Carnelian hold ice about a week longer. Late seasons happen, 2018 went to the first week of May, and when they do we work the shallow lakes first rather than the biggest customers first. You don’t have to call in the spring. Once you’re on the schedule you stay on it, and we give you the week.

On our ten lakes, anywhere from 40 feet to 400, and it’s the single thing new owners get most wrong. Forest Lake runs shallow a long way out, so 200 feet of dock is routine and 300 isn’t unusual. On South Shore Boulevard on White Bear you can run 400 feet and still be standing in 4 feet of water. Clear Lake is around 80, Lake Johanna is shorter still. Give us the street address and we’ll tell you before anyone drives out, because we’ve almost certainly set a dock within a few doors of you.

Four things set the number: how far out you have to go, whether the dock rolls or stacks, what the boat weighs, and whether you want a canopy over it. Length is the biggest one, which is why an identical boat costs more to keep on Forest Lake than on Lake Johanna. We quote installed, with the spring install and the fall removal both in the number, because a dock price that doesn’t include putting it in the water isn’t a price. Send an address and we’ll put a real range on it the same week.

Photograph everything before a single section moves, then call your insurance agent, then call us. Every adjuster wants pictures of it as it landed. After a bad storm Blake takes a jet ski around the lake before returning a single call, so the answer you get is a real one rather than an optimistic one, and we work in the order the damage needs rather than the order the phone rang. Damaged sections stay on your shore until your adjuster releases them, and hauling them off is already in the estimate, not a second call-out.

Yes for service, seasonal removal and storm recovery, whatever brand is on it. Most of what we pull off a shoreline after a storm wasn’t sold by us. New systems are FLOE only, and that is not brand loyalty for its own sake: we have installed and serviced enough of everything else on these lakes to know what comes back to the shop in year four and what doesn’t.

It can, which is why every lake we service carries them and why our trailers don’t move them. Everyone on the crew is Minnesota DNR certified, not just the owner. The barge, the floats and the waders get a 140 degree pressure wash every night. Anything crossing from one lake to another dries the full 21 days Minnesota law requires, and we don’t shorten it for a busy week. The DNR has filmed our decontamination at our own shop for their training material.

No. Most of our installs and removals happen with nobody home, which is the point of being on a schedule. We work from the shoreline and the water, so we don’t need the house, the garage or the gate. If your dock stacks for winter, tell us once where you want the sections and that’s where they go every fall after that.