Mooring or Penning the Yacht

Three options came to mind during this stage of catamaran boatbuilding. The first was the marina berth option, fresh water was always available, making a Desalinator not necessary (saving AUD $14,000) and even reducing boat weight by having to carry less water, say back to 200lts as opposed to the 500lts. Electricity was also readily available saving the batteries and therefore power generation for those batteries. Lastly, was security of the boat itself. While this could not be guaranteed in a Marina, it would definitely be much better than on a mooring in a river.

A second option was a ‘hard stand option’ where the yacht would be towed out the water after each use and stowed in a hardstand area. With a vessel of this size, we were very limited to where this could be done. Additional costs would be for the hardstand area itself and then for each movement in and out of the water. One could argue that the hardstand costs weighed against the annual antifouling costs could end up being cost neutral. Three or four days forward planning would also be required to give notice to the hard-stand operator. This presented certain limitations on use and the idea of just ‘popping out for a night or two’ at short notice, made it impractical.

The last option was our own mooring which is the avenue we chose. This would allow us the freedom of coming and going when we wished and be a cheap alternative. Our plan of attack included:

> That it needed to be within 30 minutes of our place of residence. Any further away it was thought that it became a grind to pop on the water for a few hours,

> That it needed to be in the vicinity of other moored boats of similar size. This meant that access to the mooring at low tide would normally be fine and that others with similar interests would unconsciously ‘keep an eye on our boat’ when not in use, as we would do for them if we were there.

The local Maritime Authority was contacted and within two weeks all the paperwork was being assessed. One of the questions was the exact location (GPS co-ordinates) of the proposed mooring site. We left this to the authority and to our amazement, we were charted a position 100m from the private ramp. In fact, sitting at the very small but quaint rustic looking ‘Fishermen’s Club house’ (appropriately located within the private ramp area) you look directly at Puremajek to the left and Take it Easy to the right with mangroves in the background, a beautiful spot as the sun goes down.

The approval took four months and in that period a second approval had to be sought from the Marine and Wildlife Authority before any mooring could be placed. To our amazement, all paperwork was approved by March 2006 and we were given 30 days within which to ‘stake our claim’ with a buoy of some sort or loose it.

On the internet while searching through a hurricane site, we located a section that discussed the issues of moorings verse hurricanes. While this would be highly unlikely in our area, the statistics and make-up of their mooring systems were interesting. It involved a 2 meter length of 30mm galvanised round steel, with an eye at one end and a horizontal spade at the other (allowing the unit to be screwed into the ground when turned).

This was then screwed into the ground and attached was very heavy chain. It was tested by a ships tug for strength and at 20, 000lb force, the chain gave way, the spike did not move and this was good enough for us, although on a much smaller scale. We took a ride out to our mooring position one low tide to assess the length of steel that we would need. The ground was reasonably soft, but hardened at around one meter.

There were many more challenges here that drew a headache or two.