John has been sailing with friends for many years but has finally decided to buy his own yacht. It is a 10m cruiser racer which he reckons will be light enough to sail single-handed, as his partner has shown little interest in yachting.

Apart from crewing on yachts John has sailed dinghies and has completed the RYA Day Skipper practical course, but he has little skippering experience.

He is on his first solo voyage, very sensibly taking everything slowly and carefully. He has decided that his first stop will be a mooring buoy to save any close manoeuvring in a marina.

The mooring he is looking at has a pick-up buoy and there is a little less than a knot of tidal stream. If John points into the tide, the 10-knot wind is about 40 degrees on the port bow.

John slowly motors into the tide until the pick-up buoy is under the bow and rushes forward with the boathook. He is too late, the boat has drifted away. He tries again from downwind and the same thing happens.

On his Day Skipper course John had been warned of the perils of steering a boat between the mooring buoy and the pick-up, so he is understandably reluctant to approach from the upwind side.
How is this manoeuvre possible with a light displacement boat, when the helm has to have time to move from the steering position to the bow?

Ideally pick up the mooring buoy when it is near the shrouds, so have a long line ready rigged from the bow. Photo: Graham Snook / Motor Boats Monthly

How to pick up a tricky mooring solo?

Trying to make contact with a pick-up buoy under the bow from a yacht stopped in the water is difficult in these conditions, even with a crew, and almost impossible singlehanded.

John’s instructor was right, it is a serious mistake to motor between the mooring buoy and the pick-up; passing between the two will result in the line going around the prop or at least getting tangled on the keel or rudder.

The answer is to place the pick-up and mooring buoy down the leeward side of the yacht towards the shrouds. It requires careful steering. In this case, approach the mooring buoy from downtide to rest the starboard bow on it with the wind on the port bow – harder than it sounds because as the boat slows down, the wind will blow the bow off to leeward and it might end up with pick-up and mooring buoys on opposite sides of the boat. If that happens reverse and start again.

Ideally the mooring buoy will be a few metres down the topsides of the yacht and the pick-up somewhere near the shrouds.

The boat needs to be stopped over the ground, but should still be moving through the water. It goes badly wrong if the boat is still moving over the ground. The boat should stay there for long enough to use the boathook to reach the pick-up line and pull it on board. It helps to have a warp secured at the bow to slip through the buoy mooring warp or chain.

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