A torch and a screwdriver. This is a homeowner's look-over, not an inspection — but it will tell you whether you are watching something or ringing someone, and it will give whoever you ring most of what they need.
Get a Quote →More of the structure is out of the water, and the tidal band where timber piles fail first is the band you can actually get at. Tide times for Swansea are published by the Bureau of Meteorology. Bear in mind those are entrance times: the NSW Tide Tables put high water inside the lake about 2 hours 50 minutes behind Fort Denison, against 0 to 15 minutes at Swansea itself.
If the deck is visibly sagging, a bearer is split through, or a corner has dropped, look from the shore and from underneath — not from on top. Take someone with you. That is not a rule from anywhere, just sense: you are on wet timber over water, on your own, looking at something that has already shown you it is failing. And nobody probes piles from a boat in a blow.
Every check below is worth a picture, close and wide. These ones are for you and for whoever you ring — a dated record of what it looked like, so next year you can see what has moved. They are not part of any licence application. If a letter about a domestic waterfront licence ever does turn up, Crown Lands asks for a different set again: the whole frontage, at high tide and at low tide, from the water facing in and from the land facing out.
Stand where you can see the whole length, ideally along it. You are looking for anything that is not straight: a sag in the middle, a step where one section sits lower than the next, a lean, a corner down. These show in the long view and vanish up close. What it usually means: a pile has settled or is moving. Watch if it is slight and you cannot see it change. Stop and call if there is a visible step, or it has changed since the last time you looked.
Feel, do not just look. Bounce under your feet is a span problem — a joist or bearer underneath that is no longer carrying, or a fixing that has let go — not a board problem. A board that moves is a fixing. Shift your weight side to side at the outer end: sway is bracing or the fixings holding it. Watch a small bounce in one spot. Stop and call if the whole structure moves when you do, or if it has started doing something it did not do last season.
This is the one check that matters most, and the one nobody does. The band just above and below the water is where timber piles fail, to marine borers first and wet-and-dry decay second. The worst of it sits roughly between 300 mm above and 600 mm below low tide. A pile can look sound from the outside with only a few small holes showing, and be hollow inside. Press the point of a screwdriver or awl into the timber around that band. Sound timber resists and the point skates; rot takes the point in with little effort, and you will feel it. Go right round each pile. Look too for a gap opening between the pile and the bearer sitting on it, and for the pile top itself being soft. Watch surface softness that stops a few millimetres in. Stop and call if the point goes in easily, if a pile moves when you push it, or if any pile is broken off or leaning.
Bearers and joists. Look along them for sag, for splits running with the grain, and for the ends where they sit on the piles — end grain rots first. Rust bleed — brown staining running down from a bolt — means the fixing is corroding inside the timber where you cannot see it. Below the waterline, on anything you can see at low tide, look for pinholes in the surface or timber that looks honeycombed or fibrous when you scrape it: marine borers are a known hazard to untreated or breached timber in salt water. Watch a single stained bolt. Stop and call for a bearer split through, a joist end crumbling, or borer damage you can put a screwdriver into.
Bolts, coach screws, brackets. Crumbling or flaking when touched, heads missing, nuts gone, staining — these are consumables in salt water, and they tend to fail together because they were all fitted together. Bracing is the diagonal timber or steel between piles: look for a gap at the connection, a brace that moves in your hand, or one that is simply no longer there. Watch surface rust on otherwise tight fixings. Stop and call for missing bracing, or a connection you can move.
Is the pontoon sitting level? A list to one side is a float taking water, and it gets worse, not better. Does the gangway ride freely — hinge at the top, rollers at the bottom — through the full tide, or does it foul at low water? Guide piles get the same waterline probe as any other pile; the pontoon loads them sideways all day. Watch a slight list that does not change. Stop and call for a pontoon down at one corner, a gangway that has jammed, or a guide pile that moves.
Where the jetty meets the bank. Look for rock, rubble or fill coming away from around the first pile, a gap opening between the structure and the bank, or the abutment tilting. That is the thing an owner sees before anything else does, and it is a foundation question rather than a timber one — the ground is moving, and what is standing in it will follow. Watch a little loose material after a big rain. Stop and call if a pile is standing in disturbed ground, or the gap is growing.
Any one of these on its own is enough. None of them improves with waiting, and several get more expensive with it.
A contractor's assessment is the real inspection — sounding every pile, measuring settlement, and telling you whether it is a repair, a pile replacement or a rebuild. The point of doing the walk first is that you arrive at that conversation knowing what you saw, with photos, and with a fair idea whether it is a morning's work from the shore or a barge job. Which approval it needs is on the council approval page; what the parts are called is on the jetty structures page.
Not everything is a call. Slight surface softness at a pile top, one stained bolt, a small bounce in one bay, a faint list that does not change: note it, photograph it, and look again after the next big blow and after the next king tide. What matters is change. A jetty that looks exactly the same in three months is telling you something; one that does not is telling you something else. Keep the photos in the same folder and shoot from the same spot — that is how you will know.
Lake Macquarie's shores are not all the same, and neither is what they do to a jetty: the exposed ends of the lake load bracing and fixings hardest, the sheltered western bays are more about settlement, and seagrass at the frontage changes what any repair is allowed to touch. Which of those is yours is on the lake shores page.
Tell us what you need and where the property is.