Mooring alongside a solid pier
On a quay wall, the issues are rise and fall, swell, tidal or river current, and the shape of the pier surface in contact with the boat. Bow and stern lines need to be taken well forward and aft respectively along the pier; the more the rise and fall, the further in each direction. The idea is to keep the angle of the lines shallow so that they don’t get too tight and don’t need to be adjusted. Spring lines would need to be equally long, and if you look at how any local fishing boats are tied up you may find they don’t have any.
You may also find that they tend to lie away from the quayside in any tide; this can be achieved by judicious lashing of the helm, so that the tidal or river stream works to your advantage. It’s trial and error, so try it on both flood and ebb if possible.
Piers and quaysides come with a variety of surfaces. The best, as at Scalasaig in Colonsay, is close-planking in wood with recessed ladders. Wicklow has an interesting arrangement with wide horizontal planks at intervals with three-inch gaps, so the quay wall has, in effect, a continuous ladder. The usual surface is stone or concrete, with steel ladders set in recesses. All of the above require good conventional fendering.
Ladders also provide a very handy aid to coming alongside. One crew member, standing amidships, grabs the ladder and ties a midships line round it, then clambers up to catch the bow and stern lines. Once the midships line is tied, the boat is secured and can easily be controlled from the helm while the bow and stern lines are made fast.
However, beware of that midships line. It’s temporary. If you forget about it and the tide’s falling, you could easily get ‘hung up’, dangling from it; not a good place to be. If the tide’s rising, you could just as easily find the boat listing mysteriously towards the wall. Because the rope isn’t obvious, that’s much more difficult to diagnose – been there, done that. I was once in the Confessional column, entitled ‘Hung Down’. I still treasure the Mike Peyton cartoon.
Of course, short bow and stern lines can also leave you hung up. But given that you have long lines fore and aft, how do you deal with getting ashore and back aboard, when otherwise your aim is to have the boat lie away from the pier? Double a line through the ladder at some convenient point and leave it slack or completely loose at one end, but brought back aboard with sufficient length. Obviously this is more challenging with a north Brittany range and it may need to be moved up and down a few times, but with a more modest rise and fall it’s not difficult.
More challenging surfaces include rough stone, which just demands better fendering, and projecting ladders that are not set into recesses. The answer to those is to put the bow or stern beside them, rather than the midships. The getting-ashore line is a little trickier but it can be worked out. The important thing is to be sure that when you leave the boat or settle down for the night, the boat can’t come into contact with the ladder. One way or the other, if it happens to be the only ladder, it’s also not good form to block it. Adjust lines to pull the boat out of the way, once you’re done with the ladder.
Piled structures, or steel cofferdam facings, are much trickier. A fender board is essential here but depending on the spacing of piles and the rise and fall, that may not be enough – a piled structure is best avoided.
Given that with long slack bow and stern lines the boat can move a bit fore and aft, it is important to avoid a pier experiencing swell. Surge can snap mooring lines like thread, and the merciless jolting, snatching and creaking makes life very uncomfortable.
Fenders may pop out upwards or sideways with rise and fall or surge, and if the boat can’t be persuaded to lie away from the wall, there’s no easy answer short of running a line from the bottom eye of a fender right under the boat and securing it tight on the opposite side. Unless, that is, you’re carrying one or two old tyres (wrapped in some kind of fender socks), which don’t tend to pop out.