It was late September, weeks after the cruising “season” had ended, and Quadra was tugging on a mooring buoy in Reid Harbor on Stuart Island in the San Juan Islands of Northwest Washington state.
The harbor is hugely popular during the summer and a fellow who works for the state agency that manages the moorage and a park on shore told me he once counted 300 boats on buoys or anchored there.
On this day there may have been a dozen boats in the harbor. We were watching a couple on a boat of about 46 feet struggle to connect to a buoy. State buoys consist of a circle – something like a tire mounted on a wheel – with a large O ring in the center. The ring is attached to a heavy chain that leads to the bottom and an anchor device of some sort.
The trick is to get a line through the O ring and back aboard the boat. The couple we watched hadn’t figured out the easy way to do that.
A slight woman was standing in the bow, which stood six or seven feet above the water and the O ring on the buoy. She had a boat hook and was stabbing at the ring, with little success.
The first try failed because the man at the helm neglected to heed the wind coming from behind and the boat simply blew past the mooring buoy. Turning into the wind, he approached cautiously and the woman in the bow launched the boat pole as if it were a harpoon. She caught the ring once, but was unable to lift it and the attaching mooring chain high enough to be able to feed the mooring line through it.
After several failures, the couple gave up and took their yacht alongside a linear mooring device – a system of parallel lines stretched between two large buoys and fitted with mooring rings. They hooked up, but left soon.
Later, in Montague Harbor off Trincomali Channel in southern British Columbia – a place I call the “Montague Zoo” because scores of boats flock there every day during the cruising season – we watched the same struggle repeated.
Again, a woman was sent to the bow with a boat hook in hand. Even though B.C. buoys stand higher in the water than those in Washington, she missed and missed and missed. Finally, she caught the hook in the ring, but was unable to hoist it to the bow. The helmsman rushed to her aid and, together, they finally got a line through the ring on the buoy.
I don’t intend to sound critical because mooring buoys are not widely found in Pacific Northwest waters and not all boaters are experienced in picking up a mooring.. Some marine parks use them for crowd control, but usually boaters drop an anchor for the night.
I like some of the harbors that offer buoys and usually catch moorings there several times a season.
There is an easier way than stabbing with a boat hook. One needn’t stand in the bow pretending to be a whaler from the 18th Century.
My message: forget working from the bow. Move aft.
On Quadra, the person at the helm makes a slow-speed collision course for the chosen buoy. The deck hand feeds a line through the bow hawse and loops it over the starboard bow cleat. This is a 50-foot line and the bitter end is carried aft – outside all structures and rigging – to the gate in the side rail near the cockpit.
If the approaching course is accurate, the person at the helm soon loses sight of the buoy. The line handler stands near the helm door and calls corrections, if needed, sufficient to bring the buoy close to the hull. By now, the engines are out of gear and the boat is moving slowly. When the person at the helm spots the buoy in the water abeam the door he/she pulls the engines into reverse and the line handler leans through the gate - smart people will be wearing a PFD now – and feeds the line through the ring and walks it back to the bow. Instant, easy connection.
This is easy from the wide side decks of a Grand Banks. The same maneuver is possible from the cockpit on wide-body yachts, or, cautiously, from the swim step. Getting the line forward may be difficult, though, without a side deck. It could work, I think, if a second line were stretched from the cockpit to the foredeck and used to haul the mooring line forward.
Anything would be better than dancing with a boat pole on the anchor pulpit.
And one more thought about picking up a mooring: Come on guys, you take the line in hand and let your partner take the controls. I’ve done it that way for decades, with hardly a glitch remembered.
At Reid Harbor, there’s a magnificent reward for anyone who moors successfully. That’s the wooded walk out to Turn Point and a century-old Coast Guard light house. The view from the steps of the old light-keeper’s house is magnificent, sweeping north and east along Haro Strait, north to Swanson Channel and west toward Vancouver Island.
I’m always pleased that the feds own this place and that the trail is just steep enough in places to keep the crowds small.