How Easy Is It to Moor, Launch and Store a Plymouth Pilot?

With practice, picking up a swinging mooring takes as little as thirty seconds and needs nothing more than basic seamanship. Bringing a Pilot onto a busy trot mooring ups the ante, with running lines and mooring lines in the water and other craft close on either side. It is a different skill, one that takes practice to read the water and build the confidence to place her exactly where she needs to be.

Mooring alongside a pontoon or in a marina is often assumed to be the easy option, and sometimes it is, but not always, which is worth knowing before it becomes the reason for choosing a boat. That is the honest spread across mooring, launching and storing a small boat. Most of it is straightforward. The parts that are not are learnable rather than complicated, and it helps to know in advance which is which.

Mooring

Swinging moorings are the easier end of the spectrum. The mooring buoy has a bridle or strop attached above or below the surface and a pick up buoy on top to make the retrieval easy. Manoeuvre her up against whichever is strongest, tide or wind, pick up the buoy midships, walk the strop forward and place it over the bow bollard. Thanks to the Pilot's large transom mounted rudder, slow speed manoeuvring is precise and predictable, which makes the whole job feel almost unhurried. On a drying mooring, a long keel and pair of bilge keels mean she takes the ground without any fuss too, sitting upright and level on the mud with the propeller protected behind the skeg, ready for the next tide.

A trot mooring, where a boat is secured by lines fore and aft between two fixed points rather than swinging free on one buoy, asks more of the helmsman. On a swinging mooring the boat more or less finds her own place. On a trot mooring you have to put her there and keep her there, working past boats already lying in the line, with neighbours moored close ahead and astern.

Getting into the gap usually means a ferry glide, using the engine and rudder to hold an angle against the tide so she edges in sideways under control rather than heading straight at the berth. Once alongside, a crewman picks the lines out of the water, making the up-tide line fast on the bow first since that is the one taking the strain, then bringing the down-tide line to the stern. Get the angle or the timing wrong and she can drift onto a neighbour or a line can end up round the propeller, which is exactly why it is worth practising somewhere quiet before relying on it somewhere busy.

A marina or pontoon berth falls into two camps. A sheltered berth removes the tide and most of the wind from the equation, though there is still the job of threading between pontoons and other boats to get in and out. A berth on a tidal river brings the tidal flow back into the picture, along with general traffic, so it is not automatically the easy option people assume. What tends to decide it either way is walking ashore. No tender, no extra kit, straight off the boat and away, which is probably the single biggest reason owners choose a marina berth over a swinging or trot mooring.

Launch and Recovery

Launching and recovering from a trailer is easy, provided the trailer actually suits your boat, and that is the part most people overlook. A sportsboat or RIB has a planing hull with long flat sections and a relatively wide underside, so a roller trailer lets her roll on and off with ease and self-centre on recovery, straightforward enough to manage single handed.

A displacement hull like a Plymouth Pilot is round underneath rather than flat, so the same setup does not translate. With rollers or pads supporting the hull directly, front and back, launching means floating her clear over the top of the rear supports before she comes free, which means submerging the trailer deeper than you might expect and either driving her off or having a pair of hands ready to catch her, depending on whether there is pontoon access alongside the slipway. Bunks resting on the hull are common too, and there is nothing wrong with that approach, but where a sportboat's long flat sections let the bunks sit flush and spread the load well, a round displacement hull gives much less contact area. That is why we set our trailers up with the bunks sitting under the bilge keels instead, solid GRP and a genuine structural point, with rollers down through the keel so there is nothing to float clear of, closer to a slipway than a conventional roller trailer.

Launching and recovering single handed is possible if there is a pontoon running parallel to the slipway, since the boat can simply be walked on or off the trailer. Without that, recovering alone is harder, since she cannot be brought close enough to the shore and there is a fair height to manage over the bow. It is generally a two person job, one at the helm and a second on the slipway to winch the boat onto the trailer.

With the right trailer set up and the right conditions, launch and recovery can be genuinely hassle free, though it depends as much on the slipway, facilities and weather as anything else.

Craning is straightforward, and increasingly so is dry stack storage. A number of these facilities have appeared over the last ten years, keeping boats off the water between trips while holding onto most of the convenience of a marina berth. Unlike a planing hull, a displacement hull like a Pilot cannot be lifted with the forks straight under her, so she is stropped and lifted much like a traditional hoist instead, easy enough once whoever is doing the lifting knows to expect it.

Storage

Storage ashore is the easiest of the three, as a Pilot was designed to take to the ground from the very beginning. She will happily sit aground or ashore, more or less level on her keel and bilge keels. A couple of blocks under the keel with wedges packed under the bilge keels to true her up, fore and aft and side to side, is enough. Getting that level matters, since any water that gets in over a winter needs to drain to the bilge where the manual or electric pump can shift it. A cradle is not really necessary. Between the long keel and the bilge keels, she is properly secure on four or five points without any fancy props and cradles.

The Takeaway

Mooring, launching and storing a small boat is mostly easy, and the bits that are not, holding position on a trot mooring, setting a trailer up to suit a round hull rather than a flat one, are the kind of thing that gets easy with practice rather than staying hard.