Shelter
A cove is a good berth because the water is quiet, and quiet water carries no fines through. The geometry that protects the boat makes a settling pond.
Precision Dredging · Texas & Western Louisiana
What a lake owner should know before dredging.
How the two methods differ. Why a reservoir fills your water in. Where the material is allowed to end up — not the same answer on every lake. And who approves it.
Start Here
A dredge is a permitted volume, not a machine.
A quote is not a price for running equipment. It is a price for removing a permitted volume of a particular material from a particular place, and putting it somewhere that place allows — which is why there is no per-yard price list anywhere on this site.
Shoretech runs an excavator-mounted precision dredge on sectional barges, with floating discharge line for moving material off the cut. It is small-to-medium by design, reaching into slips, under boathouses and between finger piers where a cutterhead barge cannot set up. This page is the general argument; the three cases we are called about have their own: one residential slip, a marina that has to keep operating, and a community shoreline with a board behind it.
Method
Mechanical and hydraulic are two different trades.
Nobody explains this to owners, and it decides whether a rig can reach your water.
Mechanical dredging excavates: a bucket, clamshell or dragline lifts material at close to the density it was lying in. It is indifferent to debris, which matters because Texas reservoirs were built over timber, and it works to a drawn footprint in a space measured in feet. Hydraulic dredging cuts the bottom, suctions it away as a slurry that is mostly water, and pumps that through pipe — right for fine material, long runs and large volumes, with a setup cost that needs volume to justify it.
Hybrids are ordinary, and ours is one: an excavator arm on sectional barges gives the reach and positioning of a mechanical rig, and material is then moved off the cut hydraulically, through floating discharge line, rather than trucked. A full-size cutterhead, by contrast, swings on anchors or walks on spuds and needs clear water above the ladder, so under a boathouse roof there is nowhere for that geometry to go. The trade cuts both ways — an excavator moves less per hour and leaves a rougher bottom, irrelevant on one slip and not on a multi-acre basin. We say so when a job is on the wrong side of that line.
Mechanism
Why a Texas reservoir fills your water in.
A reservoir is a sediment trap by design. A river arrives carrying a suspended load, the flow decelerates the moment it meets standing water, and the load drops — coarse near the mouth, fines carried into deeper water. Over decades that builds deltas at the inflows.
The Texas Water Development Board put numbers on it for our home water. Its 2019 volumetric and sedimentation survey of Lake Livingston measured 129,149 acre-feet of accumulated sediment — a capacity loss of roughly 7.5 to 11.2 percent depending on the baseline used — thickest in the river channels and heavy in the upper reaches, and TWDB notes its own figure is likely an underestimate.
That is why the upper Trinity arm behaves differently from the lower lake. It does not explain your slip on its own, though, because four local drivers sit on top of it.
Four Local Drivers
The reservoir explains the lake. These explain your water.
They overlap, and telling them apart is most of the diagnosis.
Prop Wash
Propeller shear routinely exceeds what it takes to lift bottom sediment, so every manoeuvre stirs fines up to resettle in the quietest corner, often the back of the slip.
Drawdown
On a reservoir with seasonal level change the bottom gets closer to the hull without a cubic yard arriving. Mistaking a low lake for a shoaled slip is the commonest error we see.
Watershed Events
One major flood delivers what would otherwise take many seasons, which is why TWDB recommends resurveying after a flood rather than on a schedule.
Where the Material Goes
Spoil is a permit outcome, never a company policy.
The thing most often stated wrongly in the trade — including, until this rewrite, on this page.
Material conveyed hydraulically arrives as slurry that is mostly water, so it cannot simply be put behind a wall and forgotten. It has to be dewatered — a settling basin, geotextile tubes that hold fines while filtrate passes through, or a mechanical press where space is tight. All three leave a return-water stream plus a residual solid that still has to go somewhere. Silt curtains, a recognized practice for controlling suspended solids, keep the work contained meanwhile.
Where the solid may go is decided by whoever owns the lakebed. The San Jacinto River Authority is explicit for Lake Conroe: all dredged material must be removed from the reservoir, it cannot be stored on the lake bottom, and it must be placed in a storage container or on approved adjacent property. Other authorities answer differently, and upland placement is not automatically unregulated either — county floodplain rules can apply, and wetland ground makes the placement a regulated discharge in its own right.
So the honest version of the line contractors like to say is this: sometimes material can be reused near where it came from, and whether it can is answered per site, per lake, per permit.
Authorization
Three different owners of the ground under your boat.
Everything below describes Texas. Which of the three you sit on decides the path.
River-authority lakes. On Lake Livingston the Trinity River Authority owns the bed and runs dredging as its own route, separate from boathouse, pier and bulkhead authorizations, pointing at Nationwide Permit 19 with its own dredging application. On Lake Conroe the San Jacinto River Authority requires a permit for dredging and any encroachment at or below the 201-foot normal pool, requires it displayed during construction, and inspects during and after. SJRA also states that dredging is not an inherent right of waterfront ownership, and that it has no obligation to maintain any water level to accommodate it. On Toledo Bend, jointly administered by the Sabine River Authorities of Texas and Louisiana, the rules also forbid excavation that would bring the conservation pool within 200 feet of the project boundary.
Corps fee-owned reservoirs. On lakes such as Lake Texoma and Sam Rayburn the federal government owns the land in fee below a stated elevation, so the Corps is landowner as well as regulator and nothing may be placed without prior approval of the District Engineer. State-owned coastal submerged land is the third case: on Sabine Lake the General Land Office administers leases over the bed.
Above all three sits the federal layer. Section 404 of the Clean Water Act requires Department of the Army authorization for the discharge of dredged or fill material into waters of the United States. The part owners get wrong: the authorization is not only about where the spoil ends up. Excavating in a protected water is presumed to discharge dredged material, so a permit is generally required even where the material is placed on dry land — the presumption is narrow to rebut, and it is the district's call, not the contractor's. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality then reviews that authorization against state water quality standards under Section 401, which is what makes turbidity control and return-water handling legal requirements rather than good manners. Unsure who controls your shoreline? Start with who approves work there.
Recurrence
Will it come back? Position, not a calendar.
There are intervals circulating online. We will not repeat them, because the ones we can trace lead back to unsourced marketing copy. Recurrence is governed by where you sit in the sediment system: a slip at a creek mouth, a canal entrance or up a reservoir arm is in the depositional zone with material arriving continuously, and that water comes back. Open mid-lake shoreline with current across it can hold a long time. Traffic matters too, since a busy basin re-suspends its own fines into its quiet corners. We will tell you which describes your water, and whether that argues for a one-time job or a programme.
On the Water
Discharge line, spoil pond, pump.
Dredging is mostly pipe and pumping. The cut itself is quick; what takes the day is where the material goes and how it gets there.
Questions We Hear Often
Precision dredging FAQ.
What is the difference between mechanical and hydraulic dredging?
Mechanical dredging excavates the bottom with a bucket, clamshell or dragline, lifting material at close to the density it was lying in. Hydraulic dredging cuts it away as a slurry that is mostly water and pumps that through pipe. Mechanical suits tight footprints and debris; hydraulic suits fine material and large volumes.
Why does a boat slip on a Texas reservoir silt in?
Two things at once. The reservoir is a sediment trap: the river slows on entering standing water and drops what it carried. Locally, the shelter that makes a cove a good berth kills the current which would carry fines out.
Do I need a permit to dredge on a Texas lake?
Effectively always, and usually in two layers. Whoever owns the lakebed authorizes it — the Trinity River Authority on Lake Livingston, the San Jacinto River Authority on Lake Conroe. Above that sits federal authorization under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. On the river-authority lakes the property owner is the applicant, not the contractor.
Is slip dredging covered by a nationwide permit?
Do not assume so. Nationwide Permit 19, Minor Dredging, authorizes no more than 25 cubic yards below the plane of the ordinary high water mark, and requires the material retained where there are no waters of the United States. A slip filling for years is often well past that.
How often does dredging have to be repeated?
Position in the sediment system sets that, not a calendar. A slip at a creek mouth, a canal entrance or up a reservoir arm sits in the depositional zone and comes back sooner. Open mid-lake shoreline with current across it holds far longer.
Three Cases
Whose water is it?
Where We Dredge
Every lake silts in differently.
Each lake has its own page, including who controls the shoreline there. All permitting above describes Texas.
Start With a Conversation
Bring soundings, and we will bring the rest.
Depths at a few fixed points, the date you took them, photographs of the structure and the access, and a note on where anything could go on your ground.