Slip vs Mooring

Living in a slip vs a mooring is an entirely different feel. Neither is better, and both have their time and place. To start our sailing journey, we actually bought a mooring years before we boat a boat. Our original goal was to see what lifestyle changes we could handle in order to make living on a mooring work full time while working. We lived on a mooring for 2 years, and mostly found that comforts were easy to give up, but making it sustainable required sticking to a strict schedule. With the lack of solar outside of summer, a fridge/ freezer isn’t really feasible, dinghy rides must be coordinated (unless you want two dinghies/ motors to maintain), and showers/mail/laundry/water/trash not being centralized means everything takes a bit more time.

This is all manageable, but when we moved to a slip for other reasons, we immediately noticed how nice it was to have the “slack” of living on a slip. Winter is much more enjoyable, forgetting to do a chore doesn’t set the boat into disarray, and everything takes less time. We do however miss the privacy, stunning views, and even the dinghy rides associated with living on the mooring. Our compromise is to live on the mooring during summers when life is easier, and do the rest of the year on a slip.

Below are what we found the nuances of living on each to be.

Mooring

The most important thing effecting happiness when living on a mooring, is have a dinghy/ motor that is reliable, and can make it through even the worst conditions. We talk about the correct dinghy choice elsewhere, but not investing in this is a recipe for burn out. The next pressing concerns will be about power (again discussed elsewhere), water, and sanitation/ waste. Finally will be nuances of living on the mooring, and having some form of storage in your car.

For water, we found that we could go weeks on 15 gallons, and often found it easier to just fill 3 portable jugs rather than pull the entire boat up to the dock to fill up. This was pretty shocking to both of us, and if you use more water while washing dishes you may get dramatically less time. For liquid waste, as stated in the “composting toilet” section, we had to empty once a day. Rather than dumping in the bathroom as soon as we were off, we found it easiest to bolt a milk crate to the storage we built in our car, and then place the liquid jugs in the car and empty at night. Similarly, all shower gear needs to be stored in the car, and there need to be places to dry towels. With cars being natural greenhouses, it’s surprisingly easy to keep things dry even in winter.

After handling the living concerns, the largest difficulties with a mooring are stopping the various kinds of “slapping” of mooring balls and dinghies that pick up in the wind. We went through many iterations to stop all these noises, but eventually settled on mooring lines over the bow roller to stop mooring ball slapping, and clipping the dinghy onto the boat directly with 4 lines to manipulate it’s position in storms. For mooring lines over the bow roller, this is annoying as you need to take the anchor off (unless you have two bow rollers), but anything else doesn’t put the mooring ball far enough from the bow. For the dinghy, if you have an inflatable, hard tie off points probably aren’t needed unless you have an aft cabin. With a hard dinghy however, we found it helpful to clip into to tie off points for our drogue and put fenders between. The 4 lines keeping sections of the dinghy closer to the hull were rarely needed, but when they were, it required specific adjustment depending on the swell and wind directions.

While not a “slapping”, another puzzle that took a bit was figuring out the best placement of the tiller. When on a slip we tie the tiller to the side to not take up cockpit space. On a mooring however, that will cause the boat to dance around and not sit facing the wind. We tried tying it in the center with the tiller “up”, but the mechanical advantage of this was poor, and it would always slowly came free. We eventually settled on tieing the tiller in the center and down low with lines running across the cockpit. This didn’t bother us nearly as much as we thought it would.

A final consideration of living on a mooring is actually maintaining it. Someone “inspected” ours every two years, but would miss incredibly basic things. We made it a habit to pull the entire mooring ball out of the water before storms and check that shackles were wired shut and that pendants and chain looked good. We did this by tying two rolling hitches on the large pendants, and then using our sailing winches to pull them to a height where they could be serviced in a dinghy. Much easier than diving and working on them under water. Also a note on pendants, make sure you have two pendants of different lengths and lash them together so they don’t twist as much. We added 5 floats to our pendants so that it was easier to pick up the mooring ball when coming back from sailing as can be seen in this article. Often the dinghy was tied to the mooring pendants close to the ball, and we could simply lift the pendants out of the dinghy itself when returning from sailing. This is easier with an inflatable dinghy.

Slip

A slip is a much more chill, though significantly less romantic experience. It feels more like living in a trailer park, but being on the water everyday still counts for something. Your enjoyment of the experience will heavily depend on how nice your marina is, and the amenities included.

For the pros and cons, it’s obviously much more convenient to be able to step off the boat whenever you want. It’s also great to have amenities centralized, but not showering in your home still gets annoying. Concerning privacy, it’s awkward to be able to hear everyone outside, but also great that people don’t know when you’re home. On a mooring, the dinghy being attached to the boat or not made our lives very public, and people would sit in their cars with binoculars and comment on our routine. From a security standpoint it still feels safe, but the mooring felt much safer as their was a public moat around your home.

In storms, living on a slip is very loud, and in our opinion a little less comfortable than the mooring. The wind whistles through all the rigging, people don’t tie their lines so they slap, and the boat itself pulls on the lines to create an incredible amount of noise. On a mooring there is a lot of movement, but it’s not erratic if in a protected bay. A slip is just jerking back and forth and noisy. In a very bad storm we’d probably rather be in a marina with floating docks and a good break wall rather than a mooring. Moorings are easier to create user failure, and the concern of others boats crashing into yours is stressful.

As for tips, everyone seems to have a different system. We attached large fenders directly to our dock so that we can come in and out without having to worry about fenders. That has worked well, though we haven’t tested this system alone over 20 knots, and always put out extra fenders in those conditions. For lines on the slip, at least one set of “spring lines” massively helps with noise and chafe, and we put most of the load on the spring lines. The bow and stern lines are left a little looser, and are equipped with chafe protection through the cleats. For hoses for wash down, we like the expandable kind as it’s a lot less to wrap up. For water hoses, do not leave them in the hot and wet dock boxes. Ours filled with gunk and slime, and it made the water come through the filter very slowly and still push through slime somehow.