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Home / Committee Pages / Mooring Committee / Recommendations for Winterizing Your Mooring
Home / Committee Pages / Mooring Committee / Recommendations for Winterizing Your Mooring

Recommendations for Winterizing Your Mooring

Moorings Stay in the Water

For years we practiced pulling moorings each winter. Now NBC recommends leaving the moorings in the water for the winter. The moorings anchors will become even more embedded in the mud and provide even greater holding in subsequent years, and chain is best preserved by leaving it in the mud.

Pendants Come Off

Remove your pendants and take them home. If they are still in high quality condition clean them and store them. We recomend removing everyting attached to the top chain, the swivel, shackles, obviously your float, and rings included. This will simplify winterizing.

Winter Sticks

Attach a winter stick to your chain and it will float in the ice (if any) for the winter. Label your winter stick clearly. There are ballasted and unballasted winter sticks. Unballasted get attached directly to the top of your chain, or to another piece of chain you add to keep your top chain in the mud. Ballasted sticks get attached to a long line, or light chain, (12' to 15') which is tied to your chain. In the past the ships store had organized a group purchase of these ballasted sticks, this is why there are many of them kicking around the club. The problem with them is that we are finding the lines are breaking. Don't use lines, don't use light lines, use chains to attach the stick to the top chain.

The important thing about winter sticks is that they are tapered. This is so they can pull under when ice forms around them. The best approach seems to be to keep lines/chains on winter sticks short enough so that the sitck is submerged at high tide. In this way if ice forms around the stick, at high tide the stick will pull under the ice instead of having the ice move your mooring.

Please do NOT use wooden sticks, 2x4', 4x4' . They often become water logged and sink, and float beneath the surface becoming a hazard in the Spring.

Alternative to Winter Sticks

Curt Coster who has tremendous experience with winter sticks has presented an alternative where lines are used to tie multiple moorings together. These can be grappled for in Spring. This method is published in the Telltale and on the club web site on another page in the mooring section. We recommend if you tie off to your neighbor, also use one stick for the group. In this way you will not have to grapple at all.

Spring

In the spring put your pendants and other gear back on and remove the winter sticks. Remember the critical importance of seizing wire on the shackles. Boats that break away seem to usualy be due to shackles opening because the seizing wire failed. Also inspect your chain to the swivels down to your bottom chain at the beginning of the year. If you have questions the moorings committee will be available in the Spring for optional gear inspections and recommendations.

Addendum

Many are purchasing 80" Taylor winter sticks, or other size Taylor winter sticks. In fact the mooring committee has 3 80" Taylors. These sticks must be weighed down or they will float flat on the water's surface. If that happens, when ice forms around them they are stuck in the ice and can't be pulled below the surface. The point of having a tapered sitck is that when ice forms around it, as the tide goes up the stick pulls under the ice. No mater what kind of stick you have you should set it so that it pulls under the surface at high tide, or nearly so, and is well visible at low tide. Honestly, I prefer to have some small amount of our stick showing at high tide. The mooring commitee has found that attaching 12' to 15' piece of older sacrificial 1/2" chain between your Taylor and your top chain will weigh it down correctly given our tides. This older piece of chain should not be so rotted that it will break. Chain set afloat will still degrade through the fall and winter.

The picture below shows the swivel in the mud. Better if you remove everything from your chain, store it in your garage, and attach the stick chain directly to your top chain with a single shackle. Be sure to grease the shackle so it's easy to remove it in the spring. Also you don't need to do the typical 3 pass wiring job, it's just a stick, but use some wire and or nylon strap.Notes:

Another reason to use this kind of stick weighted with chain, instead of the weighted sticks we were selling through the ships store some time ago, mentioned above, is that we find lines are getting broken, chains will not be so easily cut or break. Why are members sometimes losing their sticks? They seem to always have lines and not chains attaching the sticks, though we don't know why they are snapping. One thing to remember is that boats going through the mooring field might cut the line with the prop, though if the sticks are riding low this seems unlikely. At one point larger boats in the mooring filed were cutting up sticks, but this seems to have diminished with the work on the new bridge having completed. I know some were lost when the lines untied themselves. Are they fraying? Line, if used, should be heavy and well connected, ... how about an old pendant with shackles, best practice - use a chain or Dynema.

Fall 2021 we are seeing that 80" Tayors have been discontinued. There seems to be other 80" sticks that we should explore. Someone will need to do experiments around boyancy for these sticks. The shorter Tayors present the added problem of having much less stick to ride above and below the tide levels. Again experimentation will need to be done to determine best practices: how long and weight of chain weighting the stick. Maybe it's time to go back purchasing the weighted sticks and see if they can be attached with light chain. You also might want to experiment with Dynema line to hold your stick to your top chain.

-M

Last updated 4:29pm on 11 January 2025

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