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What do you think of when your hear the word pontoon? Do you think of a party boat puttering on a lake? Marine construction professionals are seeing a bigger picture. These lone vessels are earning the reputation - among those who know - as being multifaceted and rugged work boats. Boats that adjust to versatile and sometimes dangerous tasks. Tasks that allow the needs of private and public systems, including, wildlife, recreation, fire protection agencies, marinas, fish and game departments, and construction and demolition crews.

Chinook Boats from Metalite Industries, have earned admiration because their design specifications can be customized for payload capacity, weight demands, and work environment. Buoyancy, length and width can all be tailored to specific needs. Stern and bow shapes can be altered for the best utilization of work requirements and surface space.

Each customer for a pontoon boat will begin with a platform designed and admired for its durability and flotation steadiness. Depending on the complex or simple nature of the owners specifications the end product will be customized of everything from riggins, cleats, tie-downs, steering and enclosures - canopies, tarps and cabins.

The Columbia River weaves its way through the Pacific Northwest before entering into the Pacific Ocean near the Washington-Oregon boarder. With the river’s heavy flow and elevation drop this makes for an ideal spot for the 14 hydroelectric dams. This is home to many important fish species which play an pertinent role in the local economy and ecology. Dix Corporation knows this playing field well.

Project and operations manager, Armin Vogt, said his company purchased its first Chinook Pontoon boat in 2002 after the demise of an lessor pontoon: “It got crunched.” he joked. For the past six years the Chinooks have been in use for the remarkable projects on the Columbia, Snake and Deschutes rivers. Dix construction feats include several dam and lock rehabilitation, along with development and construction for a juvenile fish bypass sytem at Rocky Reach Dam.

“We’ve hauled our pontoons all over the Northwest. We use them as a work platform doing just about everything. And we use them for hauling guys and toolboxes to and from job sites. With the type of work we do, a boat is important and stability is huge. That’s one of the things the Chinook Pontoon Boats give us: You can stand on the edge and not rock that boat. You’re not tipping at all,” he said, adding, the stability of the pontoons has proved popular with divers. “We work a lot with divers. It seems that our boat is the boat everyone uses because it’s so easy to get off and on. And, when hauling people back and forth, you can pull up to the dock, keep the engine on idleit’s an easy platform for loading.”

Dix recently purchased a 30-foot pontoon that is being used to push barges on the Deschutes River. The boat was designed with special push bars on the bow, to which rubber tires have been draped to create a buffer between the pontoon and modular barges.

The barges haul everything from crawler cranes and construction materials to personnel. Although Vogt said the Chinook is being used as a “mini tugboat,” the pontoons also provide work platforms for crews that are building a six-story, 80 x 100-foot porous box that will settle 300 feet below the surface of the water - a base structure that will help regulate water temperatures in the river for Bull Trout, an endangered species.

Also, rather than build a dock, Vogt said the pontoon boats are lifted into the enormous structure’s interior to access the work. The boat was rigged with equipment to make such aerial lifts possible. The boat has also been outfitted with auto-engine winches and A-frame gantry cranes so that the boats can be anchored to rock or concrete faces with mooring lines.

When Dix was contracted to move a bridge in Portland, Oregon using the Chinook was very beneficial. The bridge was loaded onto a barge and moved downstream, to be set on new abutments. The 20-foot Chinook allowed access to the site, providing crew members to set mooring lines and prepare for the workload to follow. This job demanded a reliable water vessel. Since Chinooks are made of 0.125″ to 0.188″ marine grade aluminum alloy, being filled with Coast Guard certified two-pound density polyurethane.

Vogt responded, ” We bump into things. But the way the Chinook is built - the pontoon is foam filled - it’s durable. Even if you punched a hole in it - no problem. And there’s enough payload that the boats can haul a pretty good load. Even something as large as a pick-up truck, if we wanted to. Everybody thinks of a pontoon boat as a party boat. That’s not it. They cut through the water very well. We move at forty-five miles per hour with our two 150-horse-power engines. People don’t expect that from a pontoon boat, but we demand it from our Chinook boats–and we’re not disappointed.