In short: Dry stack boat storage sells the promise that a boat will be in the water within thirty minutes of the owner asking. Delivering it depends on a yard-wide network carrying booking requests, forklift movements, rack occupancy and lift-out condition photos, and in most UK yards the wireless coverage stops at the office wall.
Key Takeaways
- A dry stack berth earns more per square metre than a pontoon — racking stores three or four boats in the footprint of one wet berth, which is why UK operators keep adding stacks, and why a missed launch slot is expensive.
- Yard WiFi fails exactly where the boats are — steel racking, hoists, hardstanding and the hull of every stored vessel block and reflect 2.4 and 5 GHz signals, so the forklift driver ends up working from a printed list.
- Condition photos at lift-out settle damage claims — a network that gets high-resolution images off the hoist and into the yard system on the day is the difference between an insured claim and an argument.
In a nutshell
What is dry stack boat storage, and why do UK yards keep building it?
Dry stack storage racks motorboats up to roughly ten metres in a warehouse-style steel frame, three or four tiers high, and launches them on request with a marine forklift or a travel hoist. The owner books a slot, arrives, and the boat is already in the water on the launch pontoon. Trafalgar Wharf in Portsmouth runs the largest facility of its kind in the UK, and hardstanding and stack capacity has been growing steadily across the south coast and the Solent because the economics are straightforward. Racking puts three or four hulls in the space a single wet berth occupies, the boats stay out of the water so antifouling and osmosis costs fall, and the operator keeps a service relationship with every owner rather than handing them a pontoon cleat and an annual invoice.
The trade is convenience for control. A wet-berthed owner walks down the pontoon whenever they like. A dry stack owner is buying a service level, and the whole commercial proposition rests on the yard hitting it. When a Saturday morning brings forty launch requests inside three hours, tide-constrained at either end of the day, the yard is running a small logistics operation with high-value cargo, a single forklift or hoist, and no margin for a boat that is in the wrong place on the rack.
That operation runs on information, and in most UK yards the information is moving on handheld radios, a laminated stack plan and a member of staff walking back to the office to check the booking system.
Where does the yard's connectivity break down?
The office has broadband. Everything past the office door is a compromise. Hardstanding, racking and boatyards are one of the least forgiving radio environments in the leisure marine estate, worse in some respects than the pontoons, and for reasons that are physical rather than budgetary.
A dry stack frame is a dense steel lattice holding dozens of GRP and aluminium hulls. Each of those hulls is a curved reflector. The stack itself behaves like a Faraday structure for 5 GHz WiFi, so an access point mounted at one end of a rack row does not usefully reach the other. Add a travel hoist, a couple of marine forklifts, a wash-down bay and a paint shed, all of them metal, all of them moving, and the coverage map changes through the day. The usual response is to add more access points, which puts more transmitters into the same unlicensed channels and produces a network that is congested as well as patchy.
The exposed sites make it worse. Salt spray, driving rain and the temperature swing across a British year destroy consumer-grade outdoor hardware in two or three seasons, and yards that have been through one refresh cycle are reluctant to fund another. So the yard settles: WiFi in the office and the chandlery, radios on the hardstanding, and a workflow built around the assumption that the people doing the work cannot see the system that schedules it.
What does a missed launch slot actually cost?
Take a 250-boat stack running a summer Saturday. Launch requests cluster around the tide and the weather forecast, and a well-run yard will move thirty to fifty boats in a morning. The forklift cycle for a straightforward launch, collect from rack, transit, lower, is a few minutes. The cycle for a boat that has been re-racked in a different bay since the last movement, or that is sitting behind two other hulls booked for later in the day, is considerably longer.
Those exceptions are what eat the morning. Every one of them is an information failure rather than a handling failure: the rack position in the system does not match the rack position in the yard, or the booking came in after the driver printed the sheet, or the owner cancelled and nobody told the hardstanding. The driver radios the office, the office checks the screen, and the queue on the launch pontoon grows. Owners who paid a premium for launch-on-demand notice, and the ones who notice repeatedly move to a wet berth somewhere else.
Yard management systems already solve this on paper. Havenstar, Molo and the marina modules inside the larger property management platforms all hold live rack occupancy, booking windows and movement history. The functionality is there. What is missing at most sites is the ability to put that data in front of the forklift driver, on a rugged tablet in the cab, updating as bookings change, and to have the driver's confirmation of the movement go back into the system without a walk to the office.
Why do condition photographs matter more than anything else in the yard?
Every lift, every launch and every re-rack is a moment when a boat can be damaged, and dry stack operators carry the liability. A gelcoat scuff on a hull that has been handled forty times in a season is an argument nobody can win from memory. The defence is photographic: a consistent set of high-resolution images taken at lift-out and again at re-racking, timestamped, attached to the vessel record.
Yard teams know this and do it anyway, on personal phones, and the images sit on those phones until somebody remembers to email them. The photographs that would settle a claim are the ones that were never uploaded. A modern phone camera produces images of eight to twelve megabytes each; a full walkaround set for one hull is fifty to a hundred megabytes, and thirty movements in a day is several gigabytes of evidence that needs to leave the hardstanding on the day it was captured, not when the handset next finds the office WiFi.
The same applies to the hoist. A 200-tonne machine like the one at MDL's Saxon Wharf in Southampton, or the smaller 30 and 50-tonne hoists that most yards run, generates load and strap-position data that is useful for both safety records and insurance, and that data has nowhere to go if the machine is out of coverage for most of its working area.
What runs on a yard network beyond the forklift?
Once the coverage exists across the hardstanding, the applications that have been waiting for it arrive quickly.
Rack-level sensing is the obvious one. Occupancy sensors or RFID tags on each cradle position remove the reconciliation walk entirely and mean the stack plan in the system is the stack plan in the yard. CCTV over the racking and the hardstanding covers the stored asset value, which in a 250-boat stack runs into tens of millions of pounds, and covers it in the areas where boats are actually stored rather than only at the gate and the fuel berth. Thermal cameras over the charging area address the lithium battery risk that is now the fastest-growing insurance concern in boat storage: electric outboards, lithium house banks and e-foils charging in a stack of closely packed hulls is a fire load that yard insurers are asking increasingly detailed questions about.
Then there is contractor and lone-worker safety. A boatyard has shipwrights, engineers, sprayers and mobile contractors working at height on cradled hulls, often alone, often out of sight of the office. Lone-worker devices and man-down alarms are standard practice on industrial sites and rare in boatyards, mostly because the coverage to support them has not existed.
Add wash-down bay water metering, gate ANPR for trailer and contractor movements, and the same network that serves the stack also serves the wet berths, the fuel berth and the car park. That is the argument for treating it as site infrastructure rather than as an IT project attached to one application.
How is this built, and what does it cost?
A private 5G network on Ofcom's Shared Access licence is the practical route for a yard of this size. The relevant band is n77, 3.8 to 4.2 GHz, and a Low Power Shared Access licence costs £80 per 10 MHz channel per site per year, granted on a coordinated basis for a defined location. That is the spectrum cost, and it is trivial relative to the hardware.
The hardware for a typical yard is one or two small cells, mounted on the stack building or an existing mast, plus a compact core. One well-sited cell will cover a hardstanding, the racking rows and the launch pontoon, because 3.8 GHz at licensed power penetrates and propagates across an open yard in a way that a 5 GHz access point on a post does not. Devices are the usual mix: rugged tablets in the forklift and hoist cabs, cameras on the racking, routers on the fixed plant, and SIMs in the handhelds the yard team already carries.
The honest comparison is against the alternative the yard would otherwise buy: another cycle of outdoor access points that will need replacing in three seasons, a mobile data SIM in every camera and tablet, and the running cost of the missed slots and the unwinnable damage claims. On our reckoning the crossover arrives once a site is managing more than twenty or thirty connected things across the hardstanding.
Start by mapping one Saturday. Log every launch request, the time it was booked, the time the boat hit the water, and where the delay went. The yards that do this usually find that a quarter of the morning's lost time comes from stale rack positions, which is a coverage problem with a hardware answer.