Who's to blame?

[sailaboutvic]

Interesting times , we only been in our winter berth just over a week, and already things got very interesting, it seen all our pontoon was evacuated last night,
some how we got missed out , good job too as I rather be on board and deal with any problems then be stuck on land and seeing our home float off.

After a very windy day and worst was to come as night fell the pontoon got so wild that the marina felt it was too dangerous to leave people on their boat in case it broke away, lucky for everyone it didn't but a good 20 plus pontoon cleats if not many more didn't make the night that's not counting how many mooring line that wasn't man enough to do the job . and with that a good amount of boats broke away and damaged other boats,
Some may ask what we was up to while all this was going in ,well we was watching a film while the boat was snatching back and fro, now and then popping out to check on our lines and fenders as well as sorting out next door boats has their owner have return to where ever their home may be.
This may have saved us for any damage from the boats next to us .
We also have lines going back to out mid cleat as well as our stern cleat,
We believe by keeping all the lines tight that any snatching is minimal and has each line take up the tension the load is spread on all the cleat at the same time.
We know some people believe that leaving lines slack is better as the boat can move around as it snatch, my thinking of this is that not only slack mooring lines means the boat will be bouncing onto the next boat but it a bit like taken a sledge hammer to the cleats.

The million dollar question is , who responsible for the damage?
My guess is the marina going to say it was unusual weather condition and people are just going to have to claim off their insurance.
But what about the owners who left their boats in such a way that aggravated the problems by leaving their boat with unsuitable line , slack mooring ropes and not enough fenders to protect their boats .

Although I have to say the marina was out in full trying to sort out the problem this morning.
The sight of the pontoon this morning was a war zone snap line , broken and bend cleats, bent mooring spring and bits of wood all over the place , in the water was over flowing in rubbish including fenders, bits of boats , swimming ladders, ropes plus plastic and wood.
Would thought big SS mooring spring helped ? Who know , I can only say there where some of the cheapest typed all bend up on the pontoon this morning, so they wasn't much good.
As we all know if the weather is bad enough nothing would had helped .

 

[TC Tuckton]

Thank you for a good description of the value of tight lines to a pontoon in a blow. You have also put my own winter mooring worries into perspective.

 

[Peter]

Where are you?

 

[Poignard]

Sometimes it's difficult to know what to do for the best.

I have had a situation with tight lines such that as my rolled and pitched she was sometimes lifting the pontoon with her stern cleat!

 

[sailaboutvic]

There is other member of this forum here and their may like to pitch in with there option .
One of the real problem are the cleats on the pontoon , not only are they much too small to take boats of over 7 mts they are also hollow , topping that with there are two boats using the same cleats in many cases. All over 11 mts some where cats ,
Agree the weather was severe but it's not the first time we been in a winter marina with this type of storm and we had worst snatching , normally it's the boat cleats that give way .
add to that boats that have been left with mooring lines much too slack some moving more then a metre tho cleats didn't have a chance in hell.

 

[sailaboutvic]

Sometimes it's difficult to know what to do for the best.

I have had a situation with tight lines such that as my rolled and pitched she was sometimes lifting the pontoon with her stern cleat!

If you happen to be moor side to ( beam too ) lines with a little and I mean little slack probably aren't going to cause much of a problem and in all cases you would have spring lines on too if you left the boat moored up the way it right.
When your stern /bow too it really does and what compile the problem is when there other boats moored the other side of the pontoon also with slack lines the snatching on the line on cleats first one way then the other as the boats on the other side roll back on its mooring .

We used SS spring at times , we stop using the rubber snubber , we broken too many and seen many more broken as in some of the boat the other day, good quality SS springs are probably the best way to go but they are not cheap,
When we have use springs we have tighten Just enoughso they almost ready to compress the springs , in that way we found it just alow enough for the boat to move and take the snatching away from the cleats without the boat bouncing off the boat next to us.
There was a couple of 12 plus mts cats mooring on small cleats with SS springs and they where ok one did have damage but cause by the boat next to them.
In yesterday case we didn't have ours on , but used mooring lines that give a little , on the stern and on our mid cleats .
What save us from any damage was the pontoon cleats on our section where bigger cleats they went a long way to stop any problems , I can only think that at some point these cleats where replaced, we where also on board which meant we could sort out the boats ether side of us
We was also on the far out side end of the pontoon where you would think the pontoon would move much more then where all the damage happened, the end where the pontoon was connect to the land but may be the pontoon anchor chains helped.
Some boats where damages badly where the stern and in some case bow hit the pontoons , other as the cleats and lines broke ended up leaving their berth and ending up side on the the bow of the boat next to them damageing boat ether side of them as ther swing out of the berth , one or two just hanging on to the mooring in the middle of the rows of pontoon luckies other wise they would had ended up on the boats on the opposite pontoon.

 

[Babylon]

Glad to hear your boat safe and sound! :encouragement:

Re damage caused by broken pontoon cleats - the fault surely lies with the marina?

Re springs, I aways like to leave my boat on her mid-river pontoon with only a very slight amount of give - enough for the spring to stretch and therefore do its primary work, but not so slack that the boat can pick up momentum and seriously snatch.

I also always use dedicated springs, rather than a continuous line of breast-line cum spring as one so often sees, especially in marinas.

PS What does SS springs stand for?

 

[sailaboutvic]

Glad to hear your boat safe and sound! :encouragement:

Re damage caused by broken pontoon cleats - the fault surely lies with the marina?

Re springs, I aways like to leave my boat on her mid-river pontoon with only a very slight amount of give - enough for the spring to stretch and therefore do its primary work, but not so slack that the boat can pick up momentum and seriously snatch.

I also always use dedicated springs, rather than a continuous line of breast-line cum spring as one so often sees, especially in marinas.

PS What does SS springs stand for?

Stainless steels springs

 

[RupertW]

Stainless steels springs

Which I would call stainless steel snubbers (which have a coiled spring inside). Marine English and normal English using the same word for two different things again.

 

[sailaboutvic]

Which I would call stainless steel snubbers (which have a coiled spring inside). Marine English and normal English using the same word for two different things again.

I may be wrong but I think they are called mooring spring ,

 

[sailaboutvic]

This is the type I would be looking at buying .
https://www.nautimarketshop.com/sho...ber-Wire-Ø10mm-Breaking-Load-10000kg-01028644

And not these type .
https://www.nautimarketshop.com/shop/en/Stainless-steel-mooring-spring-L-320mm-D-65mm-Code-01028671

 

[KellysEye]

>We believe by keeping all the lines tight that any snatching is minimal

Not a good idea in a strong a wind the lines need to stretch, also if a strong wind is forecast we would double up the lines. Do you know if anyone did that?

 

[Stemar]

It sounds as though you made the right decision to stay on board. I took a similar decision when exceptional winds were forecast a few years ago. Jissel normally lives on a drying mooring, but I decided that the club pontoon was a safer bet, so I parked , doubled up my lines and retired below, thinking I'd be able to do my good deed for the day by checking on the several other boats on the pontoon. I was fortunate in that I was close to the shore, so the fetch was minimal. I went onto the pontoon as things really started to hot up to add an extra bow line, and thought about going down the pontoon to check the other boats, but quickly decided that, the way the pontoon was leaping around, I had a pretty good chance of ending up swimming. I decided that a live coward was far more use to Milady than a dead hero, no, make that idiot, so the other boats had to look after themselves.

As for who pays, I guess it depends on what exceptional weather conditions really are. I expect the marina's insurers would say anything over [cynic] a good F6 [/cynic]; my definition would be a hundred year storm, whatever that is for the area. For the Solent, that would mean gusts well in excess of 100 knots at the Needles, as 100 knots there seems to happen every 5 years or so. Of course, with climate change, 100 year storms seem to be happening pretty regularly these days :nightmare:

 

[Babylon]

My boat (old livery) on a Brixham YC pontoon in the outer harbour in a strong and very uncomfortable northerly in 2010:

short video of springs snatching

Nothing like the OP's situation but snatchy enough - and foolish me for not checking the forecast the night before!

I'd add that the old Bukh had vomited almost all its oil through the front-seal when motorsailing across a roughish Lyme Bay the day before (I knew how much it had puked because I kept having to fill up from a spare 5litre supply!). Oil then coated the deep and shallow bilges and both sides of the engine-bay plywood, plus contaminated the flexible water tanks... all of which made me very sick sleeping aboard. :disgust:

 

[Yngmar]

We're the other lucky boat in the same marina. Haven't got time to tell the whole tale (much cleaning up, repairs, and looking after our friends boats going on, not helped by the rain showers, but at least it's calm now). Will make a blog post of it eventually.

For mooring compensators, I did a quick survey, as we had plenty of opportunity to compare how they did. The rubber things do work, but they don't last more than a season or two (we finished ours off last winter). The cheaper steel springs mostly failed - the spring simply broke or stayed compressed. The electroplated (very cheap) ones seemed quite useless, some of the beefier galvanized or stainless ones survived, but often just one out of a pair. They're also quite screechy!

The big honking "silent" ones did very well. All of them survived and kept working. They are very expensive though. I think the first design was Douglas marine and there's an Italian company named Sidermarine who make very similar looking ones. They're very good quality and silent as there's a brass sleeve around the sliders. I've just bought a pair plus some thimbles and a bit of rope for €270. This kind: https://forboat.eu/docking-and-moor...ck-absorbers-sidermarie-9mm-x-6000kg-for-boat

We survived without absorbers (we have nice nylon cored mooring lines, which did the stretching), but snapped off two of the chocolate pontoon cleats and the boat is only still there because I was out on the bouncing pontoon with waves breaking over me and rigging lines across to the other side until they told us to get off the pontoon. One of our lines broke in the night, not sure from what as I can't find the other end, and one was nearly chafed through, but they were both older and smaller lines. Our neighbour boat went with a bang and then caught its rudder in one of our lazylines, so I had to cut it free and rig a diagonal line from our stern across the now empty berth.

Agree with Vic that boats should be strapped in tight. The surging back and forth of the boats creates horrible shockloads that tore off the cleats on either side. I put a rolling hitch on the lazylines and winched them in before re-cleating them tight (before the storm). On some sections the ground chain that those lazylines are attached to moved also, probably a few of the anchor points broke.

They were right to evacuate people by the way, they've had the planks up this morning and the steel frame of the first pontoon section is broken through all the way on one side and a third on the other. An I-beam 25x10 cm big cracked right through. The waves were funneling into that corner and the pontoon was bouncing around like a bucking bronco.

Marina staff was very good and are still sorting out things everywhere with little sleep between. I hear they made a big order for larger pontoon cleats.

Back to work!

 

[JumbleDuck]

Thank you for a good description of the value of tight lines to a pontoon in a blow.

I think it depends very much on the nature of the blow and the type and extent of shelter. I hid from a nasty one at Sound of Ulva over the summer and was advised by the harbourmaster to sit back on two stern springs with loose bow lines. It worked very nicely indeed, and we had as comfortable at time as we might have hoped for. In that case, however, we had significant waves coming through, with the bows moving up and down by two feet or more each way. Had we been up against strong winds and little by way of waves I'd have tightened everything up.

 

[Stemar]

There's no argument over the benefits of taut lines in a blow, but watch out on a drying pontoon! I've seen lines tight enough to play a tune on where people haven't allowed for the pontoon dropping further than their boat.

Also watch out when moored to a harbour wall - I've never actually seen a boat left dangling from its lines, but I have seen a few come close.

 

[boomerangben]

I would be cautious of staying on board in a real blow. A colleague of mine had a boat in a marina here when a storm came through with winds gusting to 100mph in the town. A couple of finger pontoons sheered off and his boat broke free. I went down when it happened at about 10pm to see pontoons bucking like broncos, the tidal surge over the quayside, the local lifeboat crew dressed and ready and yachts heeling over lee rail under. There was nothing I could do so went home avoiding flying bins and slates thinking that only the top of the mast would be above water. Thankfully no one was hurt and all damage was fixable and yes the boat was still floating the next day

 

[grumpy_o_g]

I would have thought that the Marina would have had to be able to show that it had done everything reasonably possible to prevent damage occurring, or that you would have to show they hadn't, depending on who's bringing litigation. It's bound to get even more complicated if you were damaged as a result of another boat breaking free as there's now three parties involved.

 

[sailaboutvic]

There's no argument over the benefits of taut lines in a blow, but watch out on a drying pontoon! I've seen lines tight enough to play a tune on where people haven't allowed for the pontoon dropping further than their boat.

Also watch out when moored to a harbour wall - I've never actually seen a boat left dangling from its lines, but I have seen a few come close.

Ofcause it goes without saying you don't have right mooring line to a harbour wall especially when there any rise and fall,
And one would expect every sailor to know this but there been time when we have seen boats hanging by their lines.