We study the interaction of surface water waves with a floating solid constraint to move only in the vertical direction. The first novelty we bring in is that we propose a new model for this interaction, taking into consideration the viscosity of the fluid. This is done supposing that the flow obeys a shallow water regime (modeled by the viscous Saint-Venant equations in one space dimension) and using a Hamiltonian formalism. Another contribution of this work is establishing the well-posedness of the obtained PDEs/ODEs system in function spaces similar to the standard ones for strong solutions of viscous shallow water equations. Our well-posedness results are local in time for every initial data and global in time if the initial data are close (in appropriate norms) to an equilibrium state. Moreover, we show that the linearization of our system around an equilibrium state can be described, at least for some initial data, by an integro-fractional differential equation related to the classical Cummins equation and which reduces to the Cummins equation when the viscosity vanishes and the fluid is supposed to fill the whole space.