Mooring Buoys is an essential skill for any boater. Picking up a mooring is far simpler than docking or anchoring. Although close-packed mooring fields can be intimidating, they don’t have to be with knowledge and experience. Here are our mooring buoy top tricks.

Let’s be real, picking up a mooring buoy from the water isn’t really rocket science.

Yet somehow, we often manage to mess it up: witness those unseemly scenes where the crew is hanging off the bow frantically clinging on to a rope while their arms are almost ripped out of their sockets.

Let’s get your boat to the mooring with as minimal effort as possible.

We have listed below the 6 key steps on how to keep your crew safe whilst picking up a mooring buoy.

1. Prepare yourself and the crew and communicate clearly when the skipper can’t see the mooring
2. Position the bow of the vessel into the wind
3. Approach the mooring slowly, shifting in and out of gear, utilising the momentum created from being in gear
4. Stop the boat with the mooring floating just off the bow
5. Retrieve the mooring utilising a boat hook if needed
6. Secure mooring to the boat using the mooring line or your own dock line threaded through the spliced eye on the mooring and back to your bow

We hope you enjoyed our mooring buoy top tricks. If you’re interested in learning how to do this correctly and safely onboard your own vessel, feel free to send a message or give us a call here.

Don’t Learn The Hard Way, Learn The Boat Wise Way!