How are you deciding when a mooring rope has reached the end of its service life, particularly when its appearance doesn’t tell you much about its remaining strength?
That’s one of five questions I’ve raised in an article on what MEG5 should address. The others concern stopper attachment strength, split-drum winches, mooring angles, and line burial.
My concern as a Master is how these decisions actually get made on deck. A procedure needs to give the crew something they can assess and act on with the equipment and information available. Are your retirement criteria clear enough to use consistently? Where do your mooring procedures leave the most room for interpretation?
When the question is : how do you know that the (mooring) line reaches its end-of-life?, the response is simple : get to know your (mooring) line!!! I myself have a ship-design and -testing experience of 50year+, while my daughter is a 15year+ boatswain on the Netherlands’ 60m 3mast schooner ‘Eendracht’ for (maritime) school trainings and pleasure sailings over the oceans. She experienced an unexpected breakdown of the ‘hanger-line’ of the mainsail causing the mainsail boom of abt 700kgs coming down. Since then, annually all 1200 standing and running lines onboard are inspected and of each line its status is reported. In the same way, all (hydraulic) winches, capstans and fixed mooring gear is (annually or after a certain number of sailing hours) inspected and reported. All this is done to be accepted under the Bureau Veritas Quality Certificate. Consequently, all of the boatswains do very well know each line on board, and they have developed a precautionary replacement schedule for all lines. Result : never a problem in normal practice, and extra inspection when an external accident could have damaged a line. I have no knowledge if quality and inspection rules by the Classification Bureaux do exist, but each shipowner should organize regular inspection, maintenance and precautional replacement of all mooring lines, and of course of all mooring gear and equipment. When one organizes the annual inspection of his car, he shouuld do thesame for his fleet. Henk Keers, Naval Architect, The Netherlands
