GL: Mooring - DO NOT Give up control of your vessel to shore side folks

[Rich Gano]

I know this started out as a tipping topic where we are all going to do as
we please; and I know Charles Culotta said it once (actually, he has said it
a number of times) about what to end of a mooring line to give to the
dockhand; but I want to hammer his point home.  To the extent that you can
(given infirmities, et. al.) I suggest you DO NOT cede control of your boat
to a dockhand.  I don't care if he is an Unlimited Tonnage Master like me or
some kid fresh off the street; a person ashore has no inkling of your skill
or intentions if things start to go wrong, and you likely have no time to
communicate detailed instruction when something is going wrong.  If a boat
gets banged up in mooring and I have been assisting, I don't want there to
be anybody for the skipper to blame but him/herself.  If I am ashore, I will
gladly drop a line over whatever I am told, but I will not attempt any
active control of the vessel like snubbing a line short to help brake a
boat - that's for the skipper and his crew to do.

When I started trawlering in 1986, I was quite content to do all my own line
handling from this little bitty 42-footer.  In fact, the last thing I
generally want to see on a pier is a line handling assistant because most
times they seem to want to take control of my boat away from me - something
you will only get when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.  I am the
captain, and I am in control at all times, AND I am the one who has to patch
and repair when the boat gets scraped up.  :)

My ideas on this topic likely arise from my naval and merchant marine
experience where the lines are too big to handle for the few shore side
folks assigned.    I just naturally continued the practice of handing the
eye-spliced end of lines ashore (when there seemed no way out of accepting
proffered assistance) and telling the person helping to place it on whatever
cleat or piling I wanted it on.

An illustrative example:

On our last trip up the Tennessee, at Hales Bar Marina, a fellow boater came
over to take a spring line from Mary for a very short slip with a lot of
wind/current pushing us away from the pier.  It was so short, I had to have
the spring line rigged from the bow chock.  Mary was going to snub the line
of our cleat as soon as I got well into the slip and had an idea of how much
spring line I actually wanted.

This was one of the few times I was pleased to have help ashore, but he had
his own idea (after Mary told him what to do with the line) about where he
wanted my line to go and was not to happy to hear me (I was polite, I
thought) tell him to stop pulling on my line and to just drop it on the end
cleat so I could put some REAL tension on it to walk in with the engines.
He was busy attempting to pull my bow to the pier when that is exactly want
I did not want.  He ended up sullenly walking away back to his cocktail
crowd gathered nearby on a houseboat - maybe he'd had one or two too many or
he was used to dragging light houseboats around.

Another point I want to make about this particular situation is this:  the
line he had in hand was NOT secured on board CALYPSO - he was pulling
against Mary.  NONE of our mooring lines are ever secured to a cleat on
board until we have the line ashore to a cleat or piling, and they are
always clear to run and not bunch up in a ball at the chock if we have to
abort the landing.  So this " helper" had no real chance of gaining control
of the bow because we could have just backed clear letting the line go.
Then we'd have had to break out and rig another line, blah, blah.  As it
was, we salvaged the landing.

Rich Gano
CALYPSO (GB-42 #295)
Southport, FL