The short answer
We detail boats around Lake Lewisville on the trailer at your house or storage lot, and in the slip. Trailered work is the default price: a Boat Wash & Vac is $5/ft plus a $75 base, our most-booked Deluxe Boat Detail is $16/ft plus a $180 base, and Gelcoat Restoration is $28/ft plus a $350 base. In-slip and on-water service adds $5/ft.
We bring filtered water and generator power, which is what makes a storage row or a dock slip a normal appointment rather than a problem to solve.
The rest of this is about what this particular lake does to a boat, because Lewisville is genuinely harder on a hull than its neighbors and the reason is in what the lake is for.
Lewisville is a reservoir first
The Corps of Engineers runs Lewisville Lake to provide flood risk management for the Dallas metro area and to store water for the City of Dallas, with recreation managed alongside that. Boating is a use of the lake, not its job.
That matters to your hull in two ways. First, the level moves. A reservoir doing flood control holds water when the watershed sends it, and releases it afterward, so the surface a slipped boat floats at is not fixed across a season. The result on a hull is not one clean waterline but a band, because the boundary between wet and dry has moved up and down repeatedly, and each position left its own deposit.
Second, the water carries load. A flood-control lake fed by North Texas watersheds takes in clay, silt, and organic matter with every rain event, and it stays suspended in the water column. That is why Lewisville is not clear and why boats that live here develop tannin and silt staining faster than owners expect.
What that looks like on a boat
| What we find | Why this lake in particular | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| A wide, soft-edged stain band rather than a sharp line | The lake level moves through the season, so the waterline is a range | Hull cleaning across the full band, then sealing the boot stripe |
| Brown tannin and silt staining across the lower hull | Suspended clay and organic load from a flood-control watershed | Marine hull cleaner and agitation, included from the Deluxe Boat Detail up |
| Heavy chop scuffing and dock rash on the rub rail | Weekend traffic on a big, busy lake means real wake at the dock | Rub rail cleaned and dressed, gelcoat assessed for correction |
| Mildew in the vinyl seams | Humidity plus covered slips plus boats that get covered damp | Heavy mildew treatment, $119 |
| Mineral scale on a trailered boat | Local supply is moderately hard, and a hot hull dries it on in seconds | Mild acid hull cleaner, then rinse cool and dry rather than air drying |
The three things we see most on Lewisville hulls
Lewisville, Little Elm, Hidden Cove, The Colony
Tell us the length and whether the boat is slipped or trailered and we will price it before we come out. In-slip service is $5/ft on top of the package.
In the slip or on the trailer
Both work, and the right answer depends on what you are actually buying.
Trailered is simpler, cheaper, and better for anything involving correction, because the whole hull is reachable and there is no containment problem. If you want gelcoat work, waterline correction, or a proper trailer detail, pull it.
In-slip is the right call when the boat lives in the water and pulling it is a whole day of its own. It adds $5/ft, which is not a convenience fee. It covers real extra setup: containment so nothing goes over the side, working from a dock rather than around a hull, and the parts of the boat that are simply not reachable from a finger pier.
What in-slip service cannot include is anything below the waterline. Growth, blistering, and bottom paint are a haul-out job for a marine yard, and any detailer who offers to handle them from a dock is selling you something they cannot deliver.
The law that shapes every DFW boat's routine
Texas requires boaters to remove all water from the boat, including the motor, bilge, and livewells, before approaching or leaving a public fresh water body, and to remove visible plants and animals from the boat and the trailer. It is a Class C misdemeanor to ignore, escalating for repeat offenses, and it exists because zebra mussel larvae are microscopic and travel between watersheds in exactly that trapped water.
Detailers rarely mention it, but the habit it forces is the same habit that keeps a boat in good condition. A boat that gets genuinely drained and dried after every outing does not develop the standing water lines, the sour bilge, or the interior smell we get called about in spring.
If your boat moves between Lewisville and another lake, the drying step is the one that matters most and the one most often skipped.
Where we work around the lake
The practical service area for lake work is the corridor that already surrounds it: Little Elm and Hidden Cove on the north side, The Colony and Lewisville on the south and east, Frisco and Prosper for the boats that live in storage lots inland rather than near the water.
That last group is larger than people expect. A great many Lewisville boats spend most of the year in a storage row in Frisco or Little Elm and only see the lake on weekends, which is genuinely the best case for a detailer: everything is reachable, there is room to work, and the boat is on its trailer.
We also service the other DFW lakes on the same terms, including Grapevine, Ray Hubbard, Texoma, Eagle Mountain, Ray Roberts, Joe Pool, and Lavon.
Timing it around the season
Two windows are worth booking deliberately rather than reactively.
The first is early spring, before the water gets busy. A wash, a wax, and a waterline clean going into the season means the staining that accumulates has something to sit on rather than soaking into bare gelcoat, and it makes every subsequent cleaning easier.
The second is at lay-up. Whatever is on the boat in November has five months to cure with nobody looking at it, and mineral scale, tannin staining, and mildew all set considerably harder over a winter. The lay-up detail is the highest-value visit of the year, and it is the one most owners skip because the season is over.
In between, the single best habit costs nothing: rinse the hull with fresh water when the boat comes out and dry the waterline rather than letting it evaporate, because the majority of the staining we remove was created in the ten minutes after a boat left the water.
This is an educational guide written to help DFW drivers budget and decide with confidence. It is not a binding quote. Your price is confirmed up front before any work begins, with no deposit.