Frog Marine divides mooring maintenance into two parts—Annual Service and Dive Inspections. The Annual comes with a full report and before and after photos. We recommend a Dive Inspection every 2-3 years, and it also comes with a full report and video. Having two separate services lowers your maintenance costs while still ensuring your mooring is safe and secure year-after-year.

During Annual Service, we scrape and hack away the marine growth on the buoy and chain—10-40 lbs/year!—to reduce wear and tear on the hardware and increase flotation of the buoy. We inspect and as needed replace worn hardware, the metal components (chain, shackles, rings) of your mooring system, which corrode in 2-5 years, depending on location. We examine and clean the rode’s eye, where a shackle connects it to the chain. We also run a weight down the rode to clean it (often another 10-20 lbs of imbedded growth) and inspect it for wear. We do all this dry, from the topside of the boat.

During a Dive Inspection, we inspect the condition of anchor and how it is resting on the seabed. Sometimes it slips on rocks or down a slope. Typically, the anchor is a concrete disc or auger, though we have seen tires and 50-gallon drums filled with cement, engine blocks (hopefully the oil was drained), and even welded-together hunks of old chain! We examine the rode’s connection to the anchor. If it is a disc, we make sure the rode isn’t chaffed, and if it’s an auger, we replace the shackle if it is worn thin. We check on the security of bowline knot (the knot that holds the rode to itself after it connects to the anchor) and midline float (if there is one). We can add one if there isn’t. Lastly, marine growth is scraped off below the knot or float. We video the dive so you can see what’s down there!