Swing mooring newbie looking for answers.

Re.sheathing pipe-the reason that that pipe has disintergrated is the sunlight-UV effect.
Also you use reinforced pipe which from my specialist pipe supplier is cheaper than the plain food grade pipe .Reinforced pipe never in my experience disintegtates and it never goes milky in colour.
 
ffiill said:
Re.sheathing pipe-the reason that that pipe has disintergrated is the sunlight-UV effect.
Also you use reinforced pipe which from my specialist pipe supplier is cheaper than the plain food grade pipe .Reinforced pipe never in my experience disintegtates and it never goes milky in colour.
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I use reinforced rubber hose split down the centre and held with 8mm electrical ties, it stays pliable in strong sunlight. The best according to a USA study into moorings is that flat polyprop fire hose wrapped around the rope riser, I have not tried it yet but will one of these days.
My mooring is a rope riser from a chain on the bottom, swivel just off the bottom so that at low tide the swivel stays clear of the bottom. Locally we have had a lot of chain failures lately. Wear where the links touch caused by sand movement in a strong tidal area.
 
If you have an oversized rope going over the bow then chafe should be fairly easy to identify long before there is any concern over strength of the remaining rope. You do need a fairlead of course to reduce chafe at the gunwhale edge.
I had for many years a buoy on a rope (rope through the buoy the swivel being down some distance to the mooring chain. The buoy was big enough to support the mooring chain but small enough to be convenient to lift onto the deck. Lifting the buoy onto the deck means no weed build up on the buoy. being a small boat the bow was pulled down a little by the chain weight. It made the boat look a bit odd ie no mast rake cos bow was down compared to with crew in stern.
Our local authority in their wisdom and to justify huge mooring licence fees supplied buoys with an obligation to use the supplied buoy. This is far too heavy to lift onto the boat. So I get some gel coat damage when (hard plastic) buoy hits the hull. So now I get the problem of cleaning the fouling off the buoy several times over summer.
I use 2 rope strops one taking the load and one as a backup. Rope size is simply as big as your cleats can handle reasonably. In my case the short rope that takes all the load has astainless steel snap shackle and attaches to a saddle half way down the bow. So no chafe and indeed protected from chafe by any other (let loose) boat that might rest on the mooring. I just have to unshackle the short strop from the dinghy on arrival at the boat and reattach from the dinghy last thing before departure. good luck olewill
 
SWMBO sometimes struggles to hook the pickup buoy (she refuses to drive), so I had the bright idea of having a length of floating rope with a small float (4pt milk container) on the end. It made it a lot easier for her as she just had to hook the floating line.

Bad idea.

Last week, due to poor communication (I couldn't hear her from the cockpit with the engine running and she couldn't hear me), we managed to overrun the mooring and the floating rope went round the prop, resulting a swim to get it sorted out but, fortunately, no other damage.

Plan B has a piece of plastic pipe tied to the pickup buoy so as to form a big loop that's easy to get the boat hook through. It'll need replacing from time to time, but it isn't mission critcal, so if I'm a bit slow doing it, it won't much matter.
 
ffiill said:
Lots of people do not realise that the grab handle on the bouy is for getting hold of it once you have hooked it with the boat hook. You hook the boat hook under the line not through the hand grab on the bouy;pull up the buoy;,
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Not practical on my mooring. My mooring is to chain, not a strop. The chain holds the line down vertical (ish!) most of the time so I hook onto the handle on the pickup buoy. Most of the time I moor up on my own...SWMBO is down below making a cuppa!....and I've not had a problem doing it the "wrong" way.
 
Stemar said:
Last week, due to poor communication (I couldn't hear her from the cockpit with the engine running and she couldn't hear me), we managed to overrun the mooring and the floating rope went round the prop, resulting a swim to get it sorted out but, fortunately, no other damage.
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That is a concern of mine, my boat is 30' and we haven't gotten around to replacing the sound proofing on the engine (removed during refit) the engine is not actually all that loud but loud enough to make communication a struggle particularly in windy conditions.
 
Chiliblue said:
That is a concern of mine, my boat is 30' and we haven't gotten around to replacing the sound proofing on the engine (removed during refit) the engine is not actually all that loud but loud enough to make communication a struggle particularly in windy conditions.
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We've got a couple of hands free transmitters to get over that problem. You can get the bits to do the same with PMR radios.

Good idea....or so I thought. SWMBO refuses to use them!
 
Chiliblue said:
That is a concern of mine, my boat is 30' and we haven't gotten around to replacing the sound proofing on the engine (removed during refit) the engine is not actually all that loud but loud enough to make communication a struggle particularly in windy conditions.
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You still won't be able to hear each other reliably, even with the soundproofing in.

What's needed is a prearranged set of hand signals for forward, astern, Port & starboard.

You won't need to prearrange the one that SWMBO will use when she's had enough and will never set foot on this horrible boat again, so moor the **** thing yourself. That will be quite clear for half a mile around.

In a story related by Salty John of this parish, a rather swanky boat came into a fairly crowded anchorage and He was using the cockpit VHF while She used the handheld. Between them, they made a pig's ear of it and discussions were, to use a diplomatic expression, full and frank, not to mention 18 rated.

On Channel 16.

This is a bad idea.
 
This is to be my first year on a swinging mooring, west highlands, 35' Westerly. Does anyone have a link to a useful diagram for how to set up a really bulletproof arrangement on deck for leaving the boat between trips? I'm thinking of a sheathed rope primary to take the tugging, but with a chain back-up in extremis, but need to know how to ensure they don't tangle in each other. Thoughts?

I'd rather spend time getting the set-up right before going ashore than coming back to sweep up the remains of the boat off the shoreline... :-(
 
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I'm not a fan of using multiple strops, as they can get tangled up around one another. But I have the luxury of being able to check on the boat as often as I want, so I'm happy with a single 32mm multiplait strop. This goes through a piece of flexible reinforced PVC hose to protect from chafe in the bow roller, and I have spliced a large soft eye that drops over the windlass. The existing strop has some layflat hose over this eye, but the replacement will have more PVC, to see if it will last a bit longer.

One important thing to watch is how well the strop is secured in the roller- a decent dropnose pin works for me.
 
Chiliblue said:
All you seasoned swingers out there could you answer some questions?

Mooring Buoys. I don't intend to use the ring at the top of those buoys with a metal rod that goes through the centre. So should I still use one or can I use a round buoy/fender with a plastic/rubber eye at the bottom to hold up the chain? My concern (I might be over thinking this) is the plastic/rubber eye shackled to the chain, is that going to be a problem?

Size, the main function of the mooring buoy is to mark the mooring and to hold up the chain. So how big should I be looking at 40cm dia - 50cm dia - even bigger?

As for the pickup buoy I am thinking big is easier to hook when things are a little frantic?
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I would recommend chain penant sheathed in plastic pipe if you like. Any plastic pipe as it gets affected by sunlight becomes hard and starts to cut through a rope penant

the chain penant should be attached directly to the riser. the buoy is just there to support things. As for the size of buoy, work it out. Weight of chain riser plus penant = x kilos. Therefore the volume of water displaced by a buoy to hold it up is x000 cubic centimeters. Double that to have a margin and also so the buoy floats half submerged. So 2x000 = 4/3 pie ( where is it on the keyboard?) r^3
Hence easy to calculate radius of the buoy and its diameter.
 
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Fantasie 19 said:
This might be helpful???

http://www.conservancy.co.uk/assets/assets/guide%20to%20layings%20a%20drying%20mooring%202013.pdf

For boat to buoy (ie pickup) I use 4mm chain to a swivel on top of the mooring buoy with a pickup buoy the other end... I'm short of cleats on the foredeck otherwise I might use that as the backup and have a length of octoplait as the main mooring point - it's kinder on the fittings....
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How long does 4mm chain last before corrosion and wear eat too much of it away?
 
I've read somewhere that some people don't have a fat mooring buoy but just use a pickup buoy on a rope and let the chain drop to the bottom when the mooring isn't occupied. I haven't tried it myself on my drying mooring where I have a 400mm dia mooring buoy, a chain strop from buoy to boat and a small pickup buoy on a rope to the end of the chain.
 
Ah that makes more sense- 4mm sounded like there couldn't be much steel there at all!

Re the no buoy setup, I am considering this for next time I renew my riser. At the moment I have 19mm chain all the way to the surface, with a swivel half way. It's a deep mooring so there is a huge fish farm buoy holding all that chain up, and it bangs and scrapes on the hull in calm weather (yes we do get a few days of that up here, from time to time).

When I need a new riser, I think I will keep the lower half in chain, then above the swivel swap to a polysteel riser. I'd want the swivel to be high enough up that I can still inspect it at low tide though. Not sure what size polysteel to go for- my bow roller can only take up to 32mm, which sets the size of the strop, so the question is do I have a join to allow the rope size to be increased between strop and riser, or do I do the whole lot in 32mm.... hmmm, decisions decisions.
 
I've had swinging moorings - mostly half tide in Chichester Harbour, reasonably sheltered but with strongish tides and sometimes wind / wave action for the best part of 39 years, a few years inbetween I had deep water moorings in various places around Chichester and Portsmouth Harbours.

Nothing could induce me to use a rope strop again.

Chain doesn't chafe through, that's really all one needs to know IMO !

On one deep water mooring I used 18mm nylon strops, with hose anti-chafe at the stemhead; the snag was, even if the strop was ket as short as I dared in the waves encountered there, in light wind over tide conditions the boat would idle up to the big floating buoy, the warp would go around it and then underneath - the razor sharp barnacles under that club's maintained buoys drew a lot of blood just freeing the strop, and when I wasn't there sawed through the rope - one such strop lasted around 3 months - but that was in a pretty exposed spot.

Even in a less exposed spot, a friend had left his E-Boat on a rope strop; he knew she was in danger, but a series of severe gales set in, he simply could not get out to her, the strop chafed through and she was a write off.

I don't believe in ' back up ' chains or rope strops or vice versa, as they can twist together and act like a Spanish Windlass, in the worst case breaking linkages or even lifting the sinker so it skates across the seabed to doom.

Better to use one substantial topchain - but above all, check and change the swivel regularly - ie check twice a season, replace the -oversized for your boat - swivel every 2-3 years.

Apart from rope strops chafing, swivels are usually the weakest link.
 
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Agree that strops and swivels are the weak links, followed by shackles- specifically, the mousing of them.

I suppose it's horses for courses though. I don't use chain as a strop because I want there to be some give in the system somewhere, and it would make a right mess of my deck and fittings. I used to work on a boat that was moored using a 19mm chain strop and frankly I'm amazed that I still have all of my fingers. Obviously a yacht wouldn't need that big a chain, but then it wouldn't last as long.

My 32mm multiplait strop has now lasted two seasons, the replacement is all made up and ready to fit, just doesn't seem necessary yet.
 
Kelpie,

well we'll have to agree to differ re strops v chains; but I completely agree re mousing shackles; I know some people who use a plastic ty-wrap - well I'd never sleep soundly with that, I always apply double wirelocking with monel wire, easily available from any good chandlery.

The idea with wirelocking, standard on any important bit on aircraft, is to put the tensioned, twisted wire against the ' unlock ' direction of a shackle etc.
 
Seajet said:
Kelpie,

well we'll have to agree to differ re strops v chains; but I completely agree re mousing shackles; I know some people who use a plastic ty-wrap - well I'd never sleep soundly with that, I always apply double wirelocking with monel wire, easily available from any good chandlery.

The idea with wirelocking, standard on any important bit on aircraft, is to put the tensioned, twisted wire against the ' unlock ' direction of a shackle etc.
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Andy,
your comment re mousing popped into my head today- I need to replace the mooring strop soon and had previously relied on cable ties (at least two!) for the mousing. But yes I would sleep better with something better.
Is monel wire available in heavier gauges? I've got a roll of ordinary stuff that I use on rigging screws etc, but it would look silly on a 1" galv shackle.
I precviously used galvanised fence wire but it has rusted through- the cable ties are fine though.
 
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