Q&A With Diver Dock Owner Eric Traver - Part 1

I had enough fun with the Todd Elliott Insurance Q&A that I decided to do another. This time with Diver Dock owner and founder Eric Traver. He has a product that really helps people in the trolling game stay organized and a unique skill set to keep innovating new solutions to problems fisherman of all kinds face. Here we go!

Where is the Diver Dock based out of and what led to you bringing it to the market?

We are based out of Grand Haven, Michigan on the shores of Lake Michigan. The idea for "Diver Dock" was a couple years in the making and people saying...someone should make something to store a diver and leader. After a lot of rounds of us saying that, I finally took the leap and bought a 3-D printer and started to watch A LOT of YouTube videos on how to develop 3-D models and transition those into 3-D printed parts. Now I'm up to 5 printers that are running for most of the day and into the night to get ready for the busy summer season ahead! There is quite a bit that goes into not only designing the products but then optimizing production settings to ensure everything prints properly and is produced as a durable product. I break a lot of prototypes dropping them on the ground to find weak points and then beef up designs to make things more durable. I've dropped a lot of Diver Docks without a diver in them on concrete and we have the design dialed in that 99.999% of the time they'll just bounce off the ground, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend dropping one with a mag diver loaded up. Although, I'd rather drop my lucky wonderbread mag diver in a Diver Dock and bust the Diver dock vs dropping it without the Diver Dock and watch the weight bust off!

What is the purpose of a "Diver Dock"?

Diver Dock came to life out of the need to manage longer leaders on divers. A lot of Great Lakes anglers have been having success with longer leader lengths (10', 15', 20'+ leaders) in recent years, but those long leaders were a mess to manage and store. Most people were wrapping the leaders around the vertical keel on their divers, but that method would leave your line all kinked up and always made me nervous about putting a weak spot in my leaders and watching a line go slack as an angry king got away with $30 worth of tackle!

What separates the Diver Dock from other products in the category?

We started out with a fairly simple design that just stored your diver with the leader neatly wrapped up. Since then, we have rolled out a few new variations. In 2025 we introduced the Diver Dock Pro which you could pair with our unique and exclusive rod mount. Just like setting a downrigger, with a little practice, the Diver Dock Pro with a rod mount actually allows you to store your diver right on your rod and deploy it directly from the Diver Dock, getting you fishing quicker when you set down on that hot fishing zone. We actually have a quick video on our YouTube channel to show how this is done. There is also a track mounted option that fits in Cannon, Bert's, Traxstech, etc. track systems. That lets you store two Diver Docks as well as a spot for flashers/spindoctors and notches to hold spoons as you rotate them in and out of action.

Can we expect anything new from Diver Dock in the future?

We have a few things in the works. We are going to have a display in the Outdoorsman's booth at the Ultimate Sport Show in Grand Rapids in March which I'm really excited about. We will be rolling out a few new products there. One of which has been highly requested from our Lake Ontario friends, and that is a Diver Dock to accommodate Chinook-style divers. We'll also be rolling out our new "Slider Dock." This is a brand new product that was dreamt up over the winter to help anglers store their slider setups for downrigger fishing. On our boat we were always trying to find a way to store our slider leaders between trips with the hottest spoons we had been running without making a tangled mess in our spoon box. Pool noodles didn't really work with the spoon, so the creative wheels started to turn and we came up with the Slider Dock! To use it, you feed your line up through the bottom and pull the spoon up into the Slider Dock. You can then wrap your line around the spool at the top end and lock the swivel into one of the grooves at the top. And our favorite feature is that it tucks your treble hooks right up inside so they don't get snagged on anything!

For the rest of the new gear and details on a Diver Dock prize pack, stay tuned for part 2!