Gaylen Racine will tell you that he’s getting on. He’s in his 80s now and spends summers at the Lake of Bays cottage his family purchased in 1966. When friends and family visit, they like to go boating, though this has become more difficult over the years.
“I worry about my friends. Getting in and out of the boat is tricky,” he says. “You may have the dock rings to hold on to, but they’re not sturdy. We needed something better.”
Design considerations for accessibility at the cottage
That something better became known as Gaylen’s Geezer Pole. On a short trip to Dorset, Ont.—shorter by lake than by land, says Gaylen—and for under $100, he picked up the only four materials he would need at the building centre: a 5-foot galvanized steel pole (2-inch dia.), a base flange (or floor flange) for 2-inch pipe, a 2-inch PVC pipe cap, and four galvanized 2.5-inch lag bolts.
A quick cut with a reciprocating saw trimmed the steel pole to 4′. He topped the pole with the pipe cap and secured the assembly into the flange. “The pole itself is a little smaller than the annulus in the stand, so it’ll wobble. You need a shim in there,” he says. So he cut a 3-inch piece from the scrap pole, flattened it to fit, and popped it inside the flange next to the set screw—and that did the trick.
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Since the first Geezer Pole was bolted to Gaylen’s dock six years ago, it’s become a popular feature. “One of my buddies asked, ‘Could you make me one?’ And so, it’s kind of proliferated on our lake. I’m this whole manufacturer,” he says. His cottage industry is small but expanding, with pole number eight installed for a friend on Lake Muskoka in May.
“As you age, you’ve got to adapt the cottage. You want to go as often as you can, but you’ve got to make it easier when you can’t walk quite as well,” he says. Gaylen and his friends may be getting on, but they’re determined to keep getting there—by boat.
This article originally appeared in the Sept/Oct 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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