Med Mooring: How to Go Stern-To Without Losing the Bow

The Manoeuvre, Stage by Stage

The table below is the whole technique. Read the middle column first: it is what is happening at the bow while everyone is looking at the stern, and it is where the night is decided.

How Far Out to Drop

This is the decision the whole manoeuvre rests on, and it is made in about three seconds while you are thinking about something else.

Four to five boat lengths off the quay is the working answer. In a typical harbour depth of five to eight metres that produces something around four or five to one — less scope than you would want swinging free overnight, and acceptable here for two reasons: the stern lines carry a share of the load, and the boat cannot veer around and re-load the anchor from a new direction the way a swinging boat does.

Dropping too close is the single most common error in Mediterranean harbours, and it is unrecoverable without going round again. You get two to one, an anchor that skates instead of setting, and — the part people discover at two in the morning — no chain left to haul yourself off the quay when the wind comes onshore. The fix is not subtle: go out, come back, do it again. It takes four minutes and nobody on the quay will remember.

The opposite error is rarer and cheaper: drop too far out, run out of chain before the stern reaches the quay, and end up two metres short with the passerelle not quite reaching. Annoying. Not dangerous.

Backing In, and the Wind That Beats You

Two forces fight you going astern. The first is prop walk: in reverse, a single propeller pulls the stern predictably to one side, and knowing which side your boat favours turns it from a nuisance into a tool. Approach so that prop walk pulls you towards your gap rather than away from it, and use short bursts of astern rather than continuous power — steerage comes from the water flowing over the rudder, which in reverse mostly means the water your propeller throws.

The second is a beam wind, and it is the one that turns a routine berth into a spectacle. A yacht going astern has a bow that blows downwind faster than the stern, so a crosswind does not push you sideways so much as swing you across the harbour. Two things help: more speed astern than feels comfortable, because steerage beats windage, and committing early rather than creeping in and letting the wind work on you the whole way. If it is genuinely too much, go bows-to instead — the bow behaves far better in wind and you keep the rudder and propeller away from the quay. You lose privacy and gain a climb over the pulpit.

Snubbing: the Part That Is Actually the Power-Set

When the stern is two or three metres off the quay, the chain comes up hard against the chain stopper and the boat stops. That moment is the equivalent of the astern power-set you would do anchoring free: the engine load goes through the chain and into the anchor, and either it bites or it does not.

So watch it like a power-set. The boat should stop dead. If it keeps easing back with the chain taut, the anchor is dragging across the fairway and the correct response — right then, in front of everybody — is to go out and drop again. And take the load on the stopper or a cleat rather than leaving it on the gypsy; the reasoning is in anchoring with a windlass.

Then the lines. Two from the stern quarters, led to bollards or rings spread apart rather than to the same point, so they resist the boat swinging side to side. Leave a metre or so of water between transom and quay — enough that a wake does not put your bathing platform onto the concrete — and finally take up on the chain until it is bar-taut. A boat lying to a slack chain surges on its stern lines all night, and every surge is a small jerk on an anchor you are trying to persuade to stay put.

Crossed Chains

In a busy harbour your chain will end up under somebody else's. This is normal, it happens to everyone, and it is only ever discovered at the least convenient moment: when you try to leave, usually early, usually with a ferry due.

The recovery is mechanical and calm. Recover your chain until it comes up tight under theirs. Get a line or a boat hook under their chain and take its weight, lift it clear, let your own chain fall out from underneath, then lower theirs gently back down. It wants one person on the helm holding position, one on the windlass and one with the boat hook — and if the crossed boat is aboard, a wave and a word gets you a fourth pair of hands and a much better morning.

Prevention is mostly about the drop:

• Drop straight out from your gap, at right angles to the quay, not at an angle across your neighbours.
• Do not drop short and drag back into position — that lays your chain diagonally across two or three other boats.
• Say where it went. If you have laid across someone, tell them. It costs a sentence and saves an hour.
• Note who arrives after you. The boat that berths later is the one whose chain is on top of yours.

The Alarm You Want Is a Different Alarm

Here is where Med mooring genuinely departs from everything else on this site, and it is worth being precise about.

Swinging free at anchor, your boat legitimately moves all over a wide circle — in the deep anchorages of the Aeolians that radius can be 120 metres. The alarm has to be wide enough to allow all of that, which means a genuine drag has to develop some distance before it trips.

Med moored, the boat is pinned between a bar-taut chain and two stern lines. It does not swing. It should barely move at all — which flips the logic: any real movement is meaningful, and there is only one direction it can go. So you do not want a swing alarm, you want a creep alarm: the centre on the anchor, and a radius just a few metres beyond where the bow is sitting now. Enough tolerance for the surge of a passing wake and the stretch of warming chain, and no more.

And the reason to bother, when you are tied to a quay with lines you can see: the failure mode is inverted. Dragging at anchor usually moves you away from things, into water. Dragging Med moored moves your transom towards concrete, with no swinging room to absorb it, in a harbour where the wind that caused it is blowing straight onshore. There is no version of that which improves while you are at dinner. The full method for setting the circle is in our guide to anchoring a boat, and an anchor alarm set on the anchor rather than the boat is what turns the bow back into something you are watching.

Leaving

Getting off is the manoeuvre in reverse and it goes wrong for a different reason: the wind that was on your beam all night is now pushing you back onto the quay while you have no lines left.

1. Engine on, fenders and passerelle stowed before anything is let go.
2. Take up on the chain until it is taking the boat's weight and the stern lines have gone slack. The anchor, not the engine, is what pulls you off.
3. Let go the stern lines — the downwind one last — and haul yourself forward on the windlass.
4. Do not motor ahead over your own chain. Recover it as the boat comes forward, exactly as you would recovering any anchor.
5. Expect the crossed chain and have the boat hook ready before you need it.

The Bottom Line

Med mooring looks like parking and behaves like anchoring. The stern is theatre — it is embarrassing to get wrong and almost never dangerous. The bow is structure: dropped far enough out, laid along the bottom rather than piled, set hard against the engine, and taken up bar-taut before anyone goes ashore. Do those four things and the manoeuvre stops being frightening, because the only part that could actually hurt you has been dealt with first.

Then set the alarm tight, centred on the anchor, and go and have dinner. The chain is the only crew member still on watch, and it is working in a fairway full of other people's.