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On my coast of Maine cruises I've
often been assigned a transient mooring for a night that, when I arrive
and find it, sometimes is "bald" -- there are no pennants, ring, or any way to
easily tie up to it, only a
large bare ball floating in the water presumably attached to a chain
beneath.
The first time I encountered one of these (the
Five Islands Harbor
Yacht Club's four or five courtesy transient moorings) it initially threw me. Once I realized there were no
pennants to grab or ring to run a line through, I let the ball go and circled
around long enough to tie a lasso on the end of a dock line (passing the
running end through its eye splice loop), then roped it on the next
approach. With the lasso taut around the mooring chain beneath its ball
it was secure,
but this made loosening and releasing the loop on departure very difficult -- the option was
leaving my dock line behind, so I wrestled it free in the end.
Never again! I devised a better method.
Ever since, when I run into the "bald mooring" situation (and it's more common than
I'd have ever imagined) I pull alongside the mooring ball and drop a
couple of loops around it, using roughly the center of a
dock line (dock line sinks), then pull the ends so the loops tighten
against the chain beneath the ball. At the bow, I tie off one end on
the port cleat, the other on the starboard cleat. When I depart, I
loosen one end and let it go free, pull in on the other end until the
line unwraps from around the ball and its mooring chain and is
recovered.
A few days after the Five Islands Harbor experience I tested this idea
for the second time on another "bald" mooring, this time in Winter Harbor,
Maine (photo below). Just to be safe I
doubled up the lines in the event that one somehow loosened enough to
slip over the mooring ball (again, dock line sinks). There was no
slippage as tension, to one degree or another, is always on the
makeshift mooring line. "Chip Ahoy" has
skene bow chocks along with two
bow cleats, and a bigger cleat just aft on the
center of the deck, so I have room to run a second set of "pennants" if
desirable. So far, I've found two lines to be unnecessary but perhaps
for peace of mind: One seems sufficient. |
