Mooring liability

[jhr]

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I have had cases of moored boats swinging into each other

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It's happened to me.

Mobo moored upriver from small yot, so rather different swinging tendencies. I was sitting on board as the tide dropped at springs one day and was horrified to find myself alongside my "neighbour", which explained the scratches in my topsides gelcoat /forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif.

Explained the situation to the Harbourmaster and they re-set the mooring. No problems since, and it's several years ago now.

 

[Emjaytoo]

Who layed the moorings in the first place?

If you each layed your own mooring then IMO it's down to you to move your boat/mooring if you can't persuade the other party to do so.

If a third party agency layed the moorings then, again IMO, it's down to them to rectify the problem and take responsibilty for your inconvenience/costs whilst they sort it out i.e. cost of alternative arrangements.

 

[Robin]

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If that is the case the risk is too high!!!! Would you be happy leaving your boat in that situation????


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I think I probably didn't explain myself properly!

Firstly I was talking about drying moorings in Poole Harbour where there is a high demand for moorings and a high concentration. That club had a license to lay moorings within a given AREA rather than to lay a specific number of moorings so there was an optimum balance between mooring numbers and spacing of them.

The ideal scenario of course would be to take the total swinging circle of each boat plus its riser chain and space moorings such that it if one lay fully stretched out say west to east, it could not meet the adjacent one fully stretched out east to west. Normally of course boats would lie more or less at the same angle, the difference here was that the moorings dried and some boats touched or floated at different times, not much but enough. Usually the shallower boats would be allocated upstream moorings of the sets allowing them as the first to float on a new tide to drift away, wind permitting.

In the case of this poster he doesn't say it is a drying mooring so we can assume that it is not and that the two boats in question lay at different angles because they have different underwater profiles or windage. We know the poster's boat is an Ovni lift keeler, but not if is moored keel up or keel down and we do not know the other boat at all, it might be for example a longkeeler that sails around it's mooring like they often do, or it might be a light mobo, all windage and no keel.

My point is that certainly in crowded areas like here in Poole, swinging moorings are closer together than theory suggests and that 99.9% of the time it works OK. I have no idea what the spacings of moorings are where you are or where this poster is based.

You asked if I would leave my boat in a similar situation to the one I described, well the answer is I did for over 10 years because that was the only choice. In the case of this poster, I would be looking for an amicable solution to widen the separation, but I was suggesting that immediate panic might be unnecesary but only he can judge that.

 

[Marmalade]

Insurers usually require you to act as though you weren't insured - if you had no insurance and were genuinely worried about your boat you'd move it now. Thus if you don't take that precaution you may queer your pitch with your insurers

 

[PhilipH]

Dan gets the prize for most common sense response - so it's move my boat to safety, reset my mooring - there's a bit of space to do so and send the bill to the guys with the mooring and boat.

Now can I pursue payment through the small claims court since I'm pretty sure having done some character checks that these guys will not pay up unless forced to?