prv
Well-known member
Is the finger pontoon style with cleats for making fast so common and wide spread across Europe and other possible destinations that you could safely base your choice of boat size on the presumption of using it?
It's very common in tidal waters, around the UK, the Channel coast of France, Belgium, Ireland, etc. Most of us don't expect to take our UK-based boats further afield than that.
Not everywhere will be finger berths, straight lengths of pontoon are also common especially for visitors' berths, but cleats for making fast are still the norm. The only real exception is some French marinas which mostly use cleats but for some unknown reason have a metal hoop on the outer ends of the fingers instead. Those can be an unpleasant surprise for a first-timer who was expecting to drop a warp over the end cleat that isn't there.
We don't use Baltic-style box berths or Med-style stern-to-quay mooring because the tidal range makes it impractical.
Pete