Med mooring stern-to, without the shouting
From the quay, mooring stern-to can look like chaos. With the boat prepared and the crew briefed it is a quiet five minutes. How to do it, crosswinds and crossed anchors included.
In this piece
Med mooring means berthing with the stern (or the bow) to a quay, held off it by your own anchor or by a laid mooring line from the bow, with two lines from the stern to the shore. It is how most town quays and many marinas in Greece, Turkey, Croatia and Italy work, because it fits far more boats along a wall than lying alongside.
The procedure, in short: prepare everything before you enter the harbour, drop the anchor three to four boat lengths out from the quay, reverse slowly and straight while the chain runs out, get the stern lines ashore, then tighten the chain until the stern sits a safe distance off the wall. Done in that order by a crew that knows its jobs, it is quiet. Most of the shouting you hear across a Greek harbour at six in the evening comes from boats that skipped the first step.
Prepare before you enter the harbour
Do all of this outside. Reversing toward a quay with boats on both sides, there is no time to look for a fender.
- Fenders on both sides, at the widest part of the boat and low enough to meet the neighbours’ hulls, plus a loose one in someone’s hand.
- Two long stern lines, one from each quarter cleat, led outside the guardrails and pushpit and coiled ready to throw.
- The anchor ready to go: lashing off, windlass on at the breaker, chain free in the locker.
- The passerelle ready but stowed, a boathook at the stern, and the dinghy on davits or on deck. Never towed astern.
One person helms, one works the anchor and nothing else, one or two take the stern lines. Short-handed, lead the stern lines to where the helm can reach them.
Agree hand signals before you start, because from the wheel you will not hear the bow over the engine and the windlass. A minimal set: an arm pointing the way the chain leads, a flat palm for “stop the chain”, a rolling hand for “keep it running”, a fist for “it is holding”.
Motor slowly past the quay and pick a slot with room for your beam plus fenders. Notice how the neighbours’ chains lead away from their bows, because your anchor wants to go down roughly parallel to theirs. And find out what lies under the water at the foot of the wall: many old harbour quays have a ledge or a spill of rubble below the surface, and the rudder is the part of the boat that finds it.
Know your prop walk
Going astern, a propeller pushes the stern sideways as well as backwards. A right-handed propeller (clockwise seen from astern, going ahead) walks the stern to port in reverse; a left-handed one walks it to starboard. Shaft drives usually have more of it than saildrives. Find out in open water which way yours goes, and how far she has to move before the rudder steers.
Then use it. With a right-handed propeller, start the run in with the stern pointing a little to starboard of the slot and let the kick swing it into line. Once she is moving at a knot or two astern the rudder takes over, and short bursts of throttle with glides in neutral keep the speed steady. Hold the wheel firmly: going astern, the rudder wants to slam hard over.
Med mooring with your own anchor, step by step
- Line up. Stop three to four boat lengths off the quay, bow out, stern lined up with the slot. In deeper water than the usual 3 to 6 m, start further out: you want at least four times the depth in chain by the time you stop (how much chain to let out explains why).
- Get way on astern. Slowly, a knot or two, enough to steer. Too slow and the bow blows off; too fast and every mistake happens at speed.
- Let go. On the helm’s signal, the bow lets the anchor go and pays out chain steadily as the boat moves astern. Chain run out too fast piles up on the bottom; chain held back drags the bow sideways.
- Check that it has bitten. About halfway in, a brief snub on the chain should dip the bow and check the boat. If nothing happens, it is skating, and there is still room to go out and start again.
- Stop short of the quay. About a boat length out, the bow slows the chain and the helm takes off the last of the way with a touch ahead. Aim to stop with the stern a metre or two from the wall.
- Get the stern lines ashore. Windward line first. Hand or throw them to someone on the quay, or step ashore from the stern only once the boat is stopped and close. Never jump. Cross them: the port quarter line goes to the starboard bollard, the starboard one to the port bollard.
- Tension the chain. Take in chain with the windlass until it is firm and the stern sits off the quay, then adjust the stern lines to hold her there. The chain holds the boat off the wall; the lines stop her moving forward.
Crossed stern lines, and how tight is tight
Crossing the lines makes each one longer, which gives it more stretch to soak up a surge, and it keeps the stern centred in the slot instead of letting it slide toward one neighbour. Where a line runs over the edge of the quay it chafes, so give it a length of hose or a chafe sleeve there.
How far off? Far enough that the worst surge of the night will not put the rudder or the transom on the wall. In a calm harbour that is a metre or so. Where ferries come and go or a swell gets in, make it two or more and let the passerelle bridge the gap. Hold her there with the chain, and leave the stern lines firm but not bar-tight, so the boat can move a little without snatching. Check it all again an hour later and before bed, because chain settles and anchors creep.
Mooring stern-to in a crosswind
Wind on the beam is what makes stern-to hard. Going astern, a boat pivots around a point well aft, so the bow is free to blow downwind, and it starts to the moment you slow down.
Drop the anchor upwind of your line, a boat width or more depending on the wind, so the chain leads up into the wind and can hold the bow there. Come in a little faster than usual so the rudder keeps biting, and have the bow keep light tension on the chain, checking it in short bursts; that tension is what stops the bow falling away. Aim the stern at the upwind side of the slot and let the wind carry you into the middle. Get the windward stern line on first. Once it is tied and the chain is firm, the boat is held, and the leeward line can wait.
If the bow is falling onto the neighbour anyway, do not try to rescue it with throttle. Go out, pick up the anchor and start again. A second attempt costs five minutes; a long scrape down someone’s topsides costs the evening.
Stern-to in the meltemi
In the Aegean summer the crosswind usually has a name. Many island harbours lie so that the meltemi blows across the berths, in gusts: you line up in a lull and the gust arrives when you are halfway in with the chain running. Arrive in the morning, before the wind builds and the quay fills, lay the anchor further upwind than feels natural, and use plenty of chain.
Once you are in, the row is part of your mooring. Morning arrivals laid their chains straight out, later ones laid theirs upwind across them, and a boat upwind of you that drags in the night drags down onto you. Good fenders, a firm chain and a look at both around midnight are the price of a quay berth in a meltemi.
Laid moorings and lazy lines
In most marinas and on some town quays you do not use your own anchor. A heavy mooring line runs from a concrete block on the bottom, well out from the quay, and a lighter line, the lazy line, runs from it to a ring on the quay.
Reverse in as you would with an anchor, minus the anchor, and get the windward stern line on first. Pick up the lazy line with the boathook, or take it from the marinero, and walk it forward along the side deck, outside the stanchions and shrouds, until the heavy line comes up. Haul that in hard, make it fast on the bow cleat, then put on the second stern line and adjust both ends.
Wear gloves. A lazy line comes up slimy and often crusted with small mussels and barnacles that cut. And keep the engine in neutral while it is in the water near the stern. It sinks, but not always fast enough, and a lazy line round the propeller means a swim in harbour water with a knife.
Taking a long line ashore in an anchorage
On the Turkish coast and in parts of Greece, many bays are steep-to, with deep water almost up to the rocks and no room to swing. You anchor in the deeper water, set it properly with plenty of scope, then reverse toward the shore while one of the crew swims or rows the end of a line ashore, the rest paying out from a reel or a coil at the stern.
Take it round a rock, a tree, or one of the rings and bollards that many Turkish bays have fixed into the rocks for the purpose. Round a tree or a sharp rock, use a strap or a short length of chain, which saves both the tree and the line. If you can, lead the line round and back aboard so you can let it go from the boat when you leave.
Use a floating line: polypropylene rope, or polypropylene webbing on a reel. It stays off the rocks and clear of your own propeller, though passing dinghies still need to see it, so keep it fairly taut.
Think about the wind before you choose the spot. The boat is happiest with the wind ahead or astern, along the line of chain and shore line, so that one of them takes the load cleanly. Beam-on is the bad case, with anchor and line both heavily loaded in every gust, and it is exactly what the afternoon meltem does to boats that tied up in a Turkish bay in the morning calm. If the wind can blow from the sea onto the shore behind you, the anchor is all that keeps you off the rocks, so set it as if you were lying to it alone.
Crossed anchors, and leaving without a fight
Sooner or later, in a busy harbour, chains cross.
To leave, start the engine and take in the stern lines, ideally rigged as slip lines (round the bollard and back aboard) so nobody has to stay ashore. Then motor gently ahead while the bow brings in the chain, with the helm following the bow’s pointing arm so the boat stays over the chain and never drives across it.
If your anchor comes up with someone else’s chain across it, do not try to shake it off with the windlass. Lift it as close to the surface as you can, pass a line under their chain and make both ends fast on deck, so the line takes the weight. Lower your anchor until it drops clear, bring it up and stow it, then let go one end of the line so their chain slides back to the bottom. Keep fingers away from anything under load. If their chain is too heavy to lift at all, ask the owner to ease it for five minutes, or call the harbour staff.
One last habit for leaving in a crosswind: take in the leeward stern line first and the windward one last. The windward line keeps the stern up to windward until the chain is pulling the bow out, and the boat leaves the slot straight instead of sliding down onto the neighbour you spent the night fendering against.