blue marble wrecked in niue!

[barnakiel]

But one can drop a loop over the mooring and so secure to the chain below the ball. One can also use a second anchor in deep water. One can also leave a person onboard (esp. with larger crews).

Hope they will rebuild the boat and go.

b.

[Jim Cate]

Originally Posted by barnakiel

But one can drop a loop over the mooring and so secure to the chain below the ball. One can also use a second anchor in deep water. One can also leave a person onboard (esp. with larger crews).

Hope they will rebuild the boat and go.

b.

According to an earlier post there was no "chain below the ball"... just a very long bit of polypro line.

The quoted failure point was a D-ring unscrewing... whatever that means!

Cheers,

Jim

[Jimbo485]

At Palmerston we used a mooring that connected to a chain tied around the coral. Looked a bit suss so we dropped the anchor within about 5 m of the bottom, told the dog to keep a close eye on things and then went ashore.

Gave Nuie a miss because it sounded too difficult and went to Beveridge instead.

Commiserations to the Vikings on Blue Marble.

[Rakuflames]

Originally Posted by robert sailor

First time I heard of a mooring ball failure there but hey it can happen anywhere at anytime, your anchor shackle could come undone or break, its really just a piece of bad luck.

I have a friend that lives on his own-made mooring. He dives it periodically to check it, and before every storm system.

He dove it once and found some links of chain down to 1/16" of an inch.

That was on my mind as a friend and I put his boat on a mooring at Dinner Key. We really didn't know how well the mooring balls were maintained, but it was better than the anchorage we had been, with lots of boats fairly close together and counting on ALL of them to be highly responsible and have excellent ground tackle for the expected weather.

In fact we were using my anchor, and that anchor had dragged very significantly in a line of squalls earlier that year. I believe the chain wrapped around the shank before it started dragging, but I had absolutely no reason to trust that anchor through three days of squalls.

As I understand it, two boats broke loose during isaac, but we could see that not everyone had followed the marina's suggestion of four pennants with chafe guard (they provided the chafe guard for free, so there was no reason to skip it.)

[Rakuflames]

Originally Posted by Dulcesuenos

Sad for their loss. Im going to guess no moorings offer any guaranty or assume any liability anywhere?

What they told us at Dinner Key was they "expected" the moorings would hold through a Category 3 hurricane but could not guarantee it. It was still our best option. My friend who lives on a mooring has great confidence in his, but ... he's a retired naval architect and retired (certified when he did it) marine surveyor. He maintains his mooring carefully. He doesn't use a telephone pole-type screw.

[zeehag]

san diego laurel street moorings when under operations of port of san diego was the location of the easter sunday 1999 china chain incident which was a force 50 on a mooring, freshly maintained, snapping, or rather reshaping a chain link to sail merrily along in over 65 kt winds--that was the peg on the hand held meter as it failed--- into 4 other boats on moorings before she could be stopped. no one was aboard. when shown the chain link in question i saw that it had been stretched and twisted open. that incident caused port of san diego to maintain yearly all moorings--440 total, in their bay.
now that the moorings in san diego are privately operated, on contract with port of san diego, they still maintain the moorings yearly. every mooring since 1999 has been inspected annually.
failures in sd bay from moorings in storms has been reduced to pennant fail(chafe and snapping under load--they are not 3 strand but are made of yacht braid)--those are provided at a price from sdmooring co---or to boat fail. lafitte 44 had bow cleats break off in a storm.

[hpeer]

How much rope do you guys carry?

I have been accused of a rope fetish. When cruising Each boat has 900' of double braid, 3/4" for the 33' and 7/8" for the 44'. This is a 300' and a 600' length. I carry that for the drouge, but also for any "O ****" situation: lee shore, salvage assist, etc.

I also carry a bunch of lighter weight floating rope, and about 50' of spare chain.

So if pressed, I could anchor in 90', at least for a while.

Don't know if I would choose to do it, but could.

[rebel heart]

I've got:

300' chain
150' 5/8 three strand
150' 3/4 three strand
~other lengths of random stuff, mainly snubbers and moorings lines

So theoretically I could drop in 120' of water but jesus would I not want all that crap paid out. There'd only be 120' of chain vertical at any point but with a 60lb anchor at the end... that's a lot of crap dangling in the water.

[svmariane]

Catamaran on the reef. Mooring ball problem. All crew safe. Sept 11th, 2013.

Quoted from this blog: Old Meets New | Little Green Boat

"One item of terrible news from Niue is that the catamaran Blue Marble was lost on the reef when her mooring parted in onshore winds. Good news, no one was injured; the crew are safely ashore. Blue Marble, reportedly, has craned onto the dock and will sail no more, a horrible way for a wonderful Pacific cruise to finish. Cruisers planning to visit Niue: the report is that it was the large fisheries mooring that failed, the moorings serviced by the Niue Yacht Club were not involved... "

Blue Marble crew report / blog: SHIPWRECKED ON THE ROCK (NIUE) | Blue Marble Includes video of boat on reef and hoisting it onto the dock.

Info coming out of Radio New Zealand this morning (9 Am Local time, Sept 13, 2013) basically same as reported in the above blogs.

I've no further info at this time...

[captain58sailin]

One of my many tasks with an Anchor Handling Towing Supply vessel is to service the commercial moorings in the oil field. They see a lot rougher usage than your average yacht mooring. These mooring use either cross stud link chain or cable. And the moorings that show the least amount of wear are the chain moorings, the cable ones corrode away fairly quickly. If you have a link that is stretched then clearly there has been too much stress put on it. I don't think I would trust any mooring, I didn't deploy myself. Having said that I recall, I used fish plant supplied moorings in the river. I did witness their deployment, they used cross stud link chain and steel mooring balls, which the shackles were welded. I don't know how small they make cross stud chain, but it would be well worth the extra cost. I am sorry for the loss of the vessel, I can only imagine how heart breaking that would be.

[Palarran]

From what I can see in the video, Blue Marble turned out better than the last two cat's that went on a reef. She at least still has a bottom. The keels are designed to snap off without breaching the hull. It will be interesting if they can salvage it.