On A Mooring

July 17, 2007
We are on a mooring.

Wazzatmean?

Well first, and most important, it means that (A) WE ARE IN THE WATER AND (B) WE ARE NO LONGER TIED TO THE DOCK!

When I announced this to my son, it became apparent that he had no idea what a mooring is. We sometimes forget that many of our friends have little or no nautical background and we throw terms about without explaining them, they find it confusing. So, for those of you who have no idea what the hell we’re talking about, let me explain what a mooring is.

If you take a boat out into a body of water and just set it there, it will quickly be blown ashore. This is not good; it clutters up the shore and the owners of said shore want you to move your boat off their property.

The least expensive cure for this problem is to drop an anchor over the side and snag the bottom. This is a very viable solution in the short term, but is of limited utility in the long run. The main reason is that you cannot carry a very heavy anchor and in a high wind, an anchor can drag loose and you’re back to shore with the property owner yelling at you again.

A better solution is to find a large heavy object (in Rockland, having been a shipping center for the granite quarries out on the islands for many years, the favorite object is about a three ton granite block.) To this, you attach a heavy length of chain. At the other end of the chain, you attach a buoyant object such as an inflatable mooring buoy about 2-3 feet in diameter. Then you affix about twenty feet of stout rope and another smaller buoy about 8 inches in diameter and take the whole rig out into said body of water and throw it in. (This is usually done with a small barge run by someone who does this for a living.)

Now, when you come up to this thing, you see a large mooring ball and the smaller one nearby. You pick up the smaller one and tie the attached rope to your boat and voila! You ain’t gonna drag that three ton block anywhere. Your boat is secured and the property owner stops complaining. That’s a mooring. In a large harbor there may be several hundred of them. The town collects a small fee to let you put this mooring there and everyone is happy. Our boatyard has about twenty of them out here as near as I can figure and we’re tied to one of them. It’s part of the deal.



From here, we have a nice view in several directions.

To the North, there’s North End Shipyard, where the American Eagle, the Heritage and the Wendameen are docked. In the picture, you can see the back end of the American Eagle, who happened to be in port today. We’re going out on the American Eagle later this month. In the foreground, there’s a white lobster boat with the letter "K" on the bow. That’s Sy Knight’s lobster boat. Currently he’s helping run the boatyard, but he says he’d rather be out fishing for lobsters.

In the next photo, here’s the back side of the carrageenan plant. It doesn’t look like much from this side, but the stuff is used in everything from food to cosmetics. It is extracted from seaweed and this is where they do it. Could be worse. It could have been a cannery. This one doesn’t smell like undescribable fish parts.




In the last photo, you can see the Knight Marine boatyard and dock. You can also see the ferry terminal, which the State of Maine is rebuilding and expanding. That’s why everything looks like a mess right now.







So that’s our world. If we want to go ashore, we can motor back to the dock and tie up or we can get in our dinghy and putt over there, or we can call "Two Toots". I’ll tell you more about him in another article.