Mooring in the Caribbean

Across most of the Caribbean: the BVI, USVI, parts of St Lucia, the Grenadines, the BVI marine parks; mooring balls are the default.

These mooring balls are buoys, usually secured to a large concrete block on the seabed, which provide a secure and environmentally-safe way to moor in a bay without using the anchor.

Coral reefs and seagrass beds run all over Caribbean bays, and dropping a hook on either can be illegal, environmentally catastrophic, or both.

Most base teams will brief you on which approach is best; anchoring or picking up a mooring ball/buoy.

Some places are more organised than others, especially where demand is high. In some cases it is all first come first serve mooring, while busier BVI spots like Trellis Bay, White Bay, and Cooper Island Beach Club have reservable moorings. A few rules of thumb that hold across the islands:

• BVI: Mooring balls in almost every popular bay. Anchoring is permitted in some sandy patches outside the mooring fields, but reefs and grass are protected. The Norman Island caves, the Indians, and the Rhone are all moored-only.
• USVI National Park (St John): Mooring balls only. Anchoring is prohibited inside park boundaries. Day-use available; overnight mooring balls are $26 per night, payable through pay.gov or the on-site host boats.
• St Lucia (Marigot Bay, Soufrière): Moorings inside the Pitons Marine Management Area are mandatory. A boat boy will usually meet you and help you tie up — agree the fee before you accept the help.
• Grenadines (Tobago Cays): Moorings only inside the marine park. Park rangers collect the fee.

Where you can anchor, the holding is usually decent sand at 15–35 feet. But the moment you see reef heads or dark grassy patches under the boat, move on.

A 50ft chain dragged through staghorn coral does damage no-one wants on their charter!

A handful of anchorages still favour the hook: Norman Island's Benures Bay on a quiet weekday, the sandy patches outside Cane Garden Bay, and sections of Anegada's western shore. Pomato Point is a favourite of ours, a lovely quiet sandy anchorage that's ideal if you're after some of Anegada's famous grilled lobster!

It can be wonderful to drop the hook, if you're confident the bottom is sand and/or good holding. You'll get a proper briefing from the charter base before you leave the dock.

Use at least 4:1 scope, set the anchor properly with reverse thrust, and dive on it if you have any doubt. Caribbean squalls can come in fast.

The British Virgin Islands (BVI) sees more charter traffic than anywhere else in the Caribbean, and the mooring fields fill up fast in peak season.

Since 2018, the BoatyBall system has handled overnight reservations in many of the busiest bays. You'll need to know how it works before you arrive at Tortola.

The three ball types:

• Reservable mooring(orange moorings, pear-shaped, numbered, Boaty Ball logo): Booked through the BoatyBall mooring website. $55 per night. Reservations open at 7am local time, same day only, unless you've paid for the upgraded membership tier. Check-in and check-out are both 12pm.
• First Come First Serve mooring (white, with an orange BoatyBall sticker, three-letter ID): Take it if it's free, pay through the app once you're tied up. $30–$40 per night depending on location.
• Day Use Only (white, yellow reflective tape, orange sticker): Lunchtime stops. Donations go to the local organisation maintaining the moorings. Don't sleep on one.

If a ball has a number and is orange and pear-shaped, do not tie up to it unless you have reserved it. Boaty Ball has a policy of suspending accounts and reporting captains who tie up to someone else's reserved ball, and your charter base will hear about it.

In peak season (December–April), the popular bays, like Cooper Island, Setting Point, and North Sound, the balls are gone within a minute of reservations opening. So you need to be fast! The routine that usually works:

1. The night before, agree as a crew where you want to be tomorrow night.
2. Set an alarm for 6:55am.
3. Open the BoatyBall app, navigate to the bay, and have your finger over the ball you want.
4. At 7am sharp, tap. You get four minutes to complete payment.
5. Once paid, a red flag appears at your ball. It's yours from midday for 24 hours.

Spotty Caribbean internet can be a real factor. If you've been getting one bar of LTE in the anchorage you slept in, expect the booking page to crash for the first thirty seconds. Have a back-up bay in mind, and be ready to anchor. Once reserved, simply sail to your next stop and get ready to pick up a mooring ball.

2. Read the wind and current before you commit.

Caribbean trade winds blow steadily from the east-northeast at 15–25 knots most of the season. Boats on moorings will be lying head-to-wind, which is what you want — approach from downwind so the wind pushes you back if you misjudge.

Look at the boats already moored. Are they lying head-to-wind, or is the current pulling them off-axis? In bays like North Sound or the Bight at Norman Island, the current can do strange things to lighter catamarans. Match the angle of the boats already in place.

4. Hook the pennant, don't grab the ball.

The mooring ball is the float. The thing you actually tie up to is the pennant: the line attached to the top of the ball with a loop (the eye) at the end.

The person on the bow uses the boat hook to lift the pennant up to deck level. Grab the loop, not the ball. The ball is heavy, slippery, and often covered in barnacles.

If the boat hook comes back empty, do not lean further. Tell the helm to circle around for another pass. Falling off the bow in a mooring field is the most embarrassing way to enter a bay!

Catamarans: on most charter cats, the boat hook person stands or kneels on the trampoline between the hulls, not on a bow platform.

The reach to the pennant is longer and the angle is awkward. Move forward to the very tip of the tramp and brace a foot against the crossbeam.

If your cat has a small bow platform on each hull, one spotter on the leeward platform usually has a better angle than someone on the tramp.

6. Cut the engines and check.

With the lines secured, kill the engines and watch for two minutes. The boat should settle head-to-wind, the lines should be taking even load, and the pennant should be sitting forward of the bow. If anything looks off, sort it now while everyone's still on deck.

Then walk the deck once: are the lines free of chafe points, is anything resting on a sharp bow fitting, are the spare lines stowed. Caribbean nights can pipe up to 25 knots without warning, and a chafing pennant line at 3am is a problem you can't solve from the cockpit.