Hello, my name is Rock Underwood and I am the owner and inventor of CleatlessDock. I grew up on and around docks and the water in Miami, Florida. I have come across many types of cleats over the years. Hardwood, Brass, Stainless Steel, Plastic, Nylon and Galvanized ones, to mention a few. My personal favorite is the homemade pipe cleat filled with concrete!

During that time, I also noticed many issues on docks everywhere I went. People tripped over cleats, bruising or breaking toes or even worse on occasions. It can happen to anybody.

The other issue was many boaters were not very savvy at tying their boat properly to the dock cleat. There was either a messy pile of line haphazardly wrapped around the cleat, or excess line was laying on the docks surface. If familiar, sorry, all boat names were left out to protect the guilty. Obviously, we are not born knowing this information and not all of us had a father who had been in the Navy, drilling it into you, every time it was time to dock the boat! So in my opinion, docks can present many types of trip and safety hazards and it has been that way unchanged, for hundreds of years.

That got me to thinking there had to be a better way, right? So, the idea for CleatlessDock was born on my garage bench, in the summer of 2007. It started out as a hole in the dock surface, adjacent to a cleat with a line box below the dock that you would stuff the excess line down into. Then to a spring-loaded spool below the docks surface with a sailboat’s cam cleat holding the line tight. After that, 8 versions were built and modified over the years, into the now CleatlessDock unit on this website.

Mission Statement

Build a bullet proof product, that boaters will be proud to own. That solves a problem, adds value, styling along with beneficial safety attributes and added functionality.