It’s a Saturday morning, and you decide to take your boat for a cruise. You open a smartphone app and request that the boat be launched. You arrive at the marina, and the boat is in the water waiting — without you or the boat interacting with marina personnel.
“No one at the marina does anything,” says Robert Brown, founder and president of ASAR Marine in Fort Myers, Fla., which manufactures cranes for automated boat launch and retrieval. “It goes and gets that boat without a human on the machine or directing it.”
This vision is not of the future. It’s happening now. ASAR’s parent company, GCM Contracting Solutions, manufactures buildings made from tilt-up concrete walls. In 2011, Brown discovered LTW Intralogistics in Emigsville, Pa., which makes storage systems for warehousing. The two partnered to develop an alternative to marina drystack storage. In 2020, Gulf Star Marina in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., opened with an ASAR system.
The heart of the Gulf Star facility is an electric crane supported by four steel pillars (think huge vending machine). The crane retrieves a boat from a slot in the rack, then places it on a delivery cart that moves the boat to the water.
“If we had a 400-boat barn, we can program it to rearrange the boats inside,” Brown says. “A boat doesn’t get put in slot A-2; it goes where it fits at the machine’s convenience. It is the only system in the world that puts away a boat multiple boats deep.”
ASAR’s system is an example of the advanced technologies and amenities that boaters now expect to find in marinas. Boats have more amenities than ever, and their owners want the same luxury experience in marina slips. They also want to see that the marinas are being built and managed sustainably.
Another good example is the new Las Olas Marina, which is being built in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to serve yachts as large as 250 feet. It will have fine dining, boutique shops and a pedestrian-friendly landscape, as well as several acres of land converted back to natural habitat.
“It’s designed to be a five-star amenity experience for the owners and crew who use the facility,” says David Filler, chief development officer at Suntex Marinas.
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Another area of focus is maximizing how efficiently marina space is used. ASAR’s electric crane takes up less space than a forklift and the pathway it needs to operate. “We can put away the most boats per cubic foot of building compared to anything else,” Brown says.
The equipment is custom-designed for an application. ASAR is developing a crane for 50-foot boats weighing 40,000 pounds and is in discussions for 65-footers that weigh 100,000. “Today’s forklifts will not pick up those boats,” he says. “Ours is centered over the four posts and doesn’t care about the boat’s weight.”
When the ASAR system is fully automated, people aren’t allowed in the building, so the possibility of operator error is eliminated. “The crane measures the boat every time it goes in,” Brown says. “It’s almost impossible to put away a boat and damage it.”
Because the building that houses the ASAR crane is concrete, it can be engineered to support other uses, such as residences, swimming pools or commerce. “We’re in discussions with a company doing a [storage] barn next to a condominium,” Brown says. “They didn’t want a big, ugly, metal building next to their place, and they didn’t want a forklift running all day. The emissions from a forklift are eliminated.”
Brown says it costs about $15 an hour to run the crane. A 100,000-square-foot building could cost twice as much for ASAR to build, but he estimates it would hold more than twice as many boats. “It’s for somebody who understands the end of the spreadsheet,” Brown says. “We almost double the ROI.”
Another electric crane manufacturer is Capria Stacker Machinery in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Company director Andres Capria says marina stacking equipment makes up about 50% of the company’s business, and he wants to expand that to 80%. Most of the business is in Argentina, where stacking machines have been used extensively because of limited space.
The company offers two types of cranes: a top-running model installed on a ceiling, and a more popular floor-running unit that rolls on rails. A Capria crane is run by an operator who sits in a cabin next to the base of the forks. “We use a smaller aisle to move the same boat, so you can use a smaller building,” Capria says. “And we are much faster than a forklift.”
Capria does custom designs and uses equipment sourced in the country where the crane is being used. Some of Capria’s buildings have solar panels, so the draw on the power grid is minimal. A standard Capria package can handle boats up to 44 feet and about 22,000 pounds. Capria says he has customers asking for a crane that can handle 12 tons. “The size doesn’t matter, but what matters is the load center of the boat and the distance,” he says.
Compared with a forklift, Capria says, his crane is less expensive than an electric model but more costly than a conventional one. “When you compare the floor and the bigger building, the crane is the better investment.”
Supply and Demand
Las Olas Marina’s redevelopment came about because there wasn’t enough moorage for large, privately owned yachts in Fort Lauderdale. “There are plenty of marinas that have slips for smaller vessels,” Filler says, “but there’s just so many more large boats that are having trouble finding available slips.”
The total investment for the project is $68 million, and Suntex has a 55-year lease with the city. Suntex also controls the leases for the Hall of Fame and Bahia Mar marinas. “It’s effectively a public-private partnership,” Filler says. Las Olas Marina will have 82 slips primarily for boats in the 80- to 120-foot range. The largest vessel the marina can accommodate is 250 feet. There will also be 50,000 square feet of restaurants, retail stores, bathrooms, a gym, a captain’s lounge and a rooftop pool.
Contractors dredged and excavated approximately 170,000 cubic yards from the waterfront to arrive at an average depth of about 15 feet. Suntex also worked with Florida Power & Light to provide enough power to support the annual Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show without having to stack generators on temporary docks. “There’s substantial power upgrades to accommodate the power needs of the newer vessels,” Filler says. “Boats have way more power loads because of electronics, washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, Wi-Fi and all the extra equipment that vessels now carry.”
Filler estimates that Suntex is spending $8 million on utility infrastructure, with $4 million on plug-in pedestals, $2.4 million for wiring and $1.5 million for installation. Bellingham Marine, based in Newport Beach, Calif., is providing the floating concrete dock system. It’s also designing and installing the water and sewer systems.
One thing that guests will not see at Las Olas Marina is a fuel dock. Fuel delivery is integrated into the marina’s infrastructure. A fuel truck will pull up, connect to the system, and pump directly to a vessel. There’s in-dock fueling at every slip.
Las Olas Marina is also being redeveloped to withstand a category 5 hurricane and a 12-foot storm surge. The steel pilings, which range in size from 12 to 18 inches in diameter, stand 12 feet above the mean high tide. Main piers are 10 to 12 feet wide. Fingers range from 4 to 8 feet.
The Long View
Regardless of the boat-retrieval system, more marinas are moving toward drystacks for storage, and developers are looking at areas they might have previously scoffed at when considering building a facility.
“One of the other major trends is a real focus on sustainable and resilient design, and being as environmentally sensitive as you can,” says Greg Weykamp, president of Edgewater Resources, an architectural and engineering firm based in Madison, Wis. “The idea is to work more with nature, and focus on using the currents and drift patterns to passively move sediment around them.”
His firm was hired to do a feasibility study for a marina in South Padre Island, Texas. The developers want to be able to bring in big sportfishing boats, but the depth in the proposed location is only 4 feet. To create a protected area with the required depth, his firm designed an offshore structure called a “non-revenue creating infrastructure.” In simpler terms, it’s a breakwater that will create a protected basin where a private developer can build a marina.
Part of the project is the development of South Padre Island Marine Park, a community-funded effort to provide low-cost access to boating. Because the structure is in a migration area for sea turtles, it creates a habitat for them and provides protection against hurricanes.
One element of marinas that appears slow to change is the material used to build them. Weykamp says he mostly sees treated pine for the decking. He prefers the higher-quality pine made by Kebony, a Norwegian company. “They take a polymer that they extract from processed sugar cane, and they inject the wood,” Weykamp says, adding that the result looks and feels like a hardwood, and has a 30-year warranty. Concrete decking also continues to be a popular material for walking surfaces.
For dock and slip framework, the choices are monolithic concrete, aluminum, steel and wood. Because aluminum is lighter, it needs a more protected environment, while steel is favored in active areas, and for larger docks and piers.
“I tend to lean toward heavier systems because I like the way it feels underfoot,” Weykamp says. “Our job is to help people sort out what’s the right type of dock for your wave climate.”
With electrification being in its early stages, Weykamp says he can’t ignore the prospect of implementing charging for electric boats into a new marina’s infrastructure, but he still isn’t seeing enough demand to commit even half of a marina for electric boats.
At Marine Development in Eufaula, Okla., expanding ways to use solar power is one of the company’s goals. “We’ve heard talk of solar roadways,” says director of engineering Dwight Boggs. “That same type of methodology can be adapted to a walking surface. Why not take advantage of capturing the energy radiating off that?” He envisions using that walking surface to generate power to charge electric boats.
With coastal and inland projects, Weykamp must consider rising water levels from climate change. “We know it’s happening, and the only question is, how fast is it going to happen?” he says. “On the Great Lakes, the best climate science says we won’t get wildly higher or lower; it’s just going to go up and down with more volatility.”
A similar consideration is storm surge. “It’s more about the water than it is about the wind,” says Rob Fowler Jr., president and CEO of Fowler Construction and Development, a marina contractor in Fort Myers. Recent storms, he says, have shown that “the damage is all from the water.” Marinas and properties built after Florida toughened building codes in 2000 have come through storms in better condition, he adds. “We had restaurants that had 8 feet of water in them that reopened as soon as the water came out,” Fowler says.
Fowler says designers have been specifying taller pilings on new builds. “We’re building 12 feet in the air, and no one’s complaining about it,” he says. “They may look funny until the next [Hurricane] Ian and things are saved because they were being planned for.”
An Extra Step
As if the challenges of increased demand for more power and connectivity weren’t enough, marina developers and management teams in some areas of the world have the added task of needing to make their own fresh water.
D Marin is based in Athens, Greece, and has marinas in nine areas, including the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates. “We’re in beautiful locations, but we’re not in high-population areas. We need to convert seawater to fresh to wash boats, to drive toilet and water supplies,” says chief commercial officer Dean Smith. “It’s something we need to consider at the early stage of development.”
On the electrical side, 20 years ago, a visiting yacht needed 32 amps of shore power. Now a boat might need 120 amps to charge all the on-board toys.
“Electrification, not in the Tesla sense, is something that we really need to understand,” Smith says. “We’re trying to be more power independent, and we have a fantastic resource called the sun.” At one facility, the company invested $2.7 million in solar systems.
A unique element of D Marin’s marinas is that some are in a desert environment. Miami and Los Angeles get hot, but they don’t get Dubai hot. In these areas, the company has implemented sensors in its berthing packages. A customer who makes a D Marin property his home port will be provided a temperature sensor for the engine room, a high-water alert for the bilge, and battery minders.
“We want to make sure we don’t have problems, so we’re trying to provide warnings,” Smith says. “If I see an engine room that’s 50 degrees [Celsius] but goes to 70, that’s a problem. We can’t risk that.”
Finally, there’s what the clients want from the facility, including being aware of the marina’s impact on the environment. “What we’re finding is that if you’ve got a 100-foot-plus boat,” Smith says, “the last thing [an owner] wants to hear is, ‘You keep your boat berthed in that dirty harbor.’ ”
This article was originally published in the February 2024 issue.
