Hook and Moor

Let me tell you something about boating in the inland waters of the Netherlands, especially the waters in Friesland. Besides marinas, there are a lot of locations in nature where you can dock your boat. In the seventies and eighties, you dock your boat to land of a farmer. In that time, not a lot of people had boats, and everyone was nice to the environment.

But as always, humans ruin the hospitality of the farmers. They put trash on land and damage the land. So, in that period a foundation started “Marrekrite”. This foundation is subsidized by local governments and gets gifts from boaters. The foundation bought a lot of small strips of land from the farmers. These strips get nice wall protection, docking rings or docking bollards. Also, they put everywhere waste containers. Boaters can dock their boat in nature, for a maximum of 48 hours. There are many places in Friesland like that so wherever you go, most of the time you can dock your boat for “free”. The foundation sells every year flags which you can raise in the mast.

But…. As always there is a but…. In 2020 during Corona, many non-boaters did buy or rents a boat and go onto the waters. And as quite as it was a couple of years ago, as crowdy it was now. Everywhere you see boats on Marrekrite places. The land strips are full of people like camping spots. And unfortunately, we didn’t like it that much.

So, we needed to find a way for us. We tried to anchor twice but we didn’t manage that well. Conclusion, we need to practice more. So, we didn’t trust our anchor skills to sleep on anchor. And then it looks like Marrekrite is helping us. Since a couple of years, they placed mooring in the lakes. Really great except that our boat is much too high to grab the mooring safe. The moorings don’t have a line on it, it’s just two plastic balls with a metal ring on top. If we would lay down on the boat, we probably could take it, but it would be unsafe to put a line through the ring. So last year, we didn’t use the moorings of Marrekrite.

And then in December “Sinterklaas” was coming to town in the Netherlands en brought a special gift for us. It was the Moor and Hook. What an invention! If you see the Moor and Hook in action, you can’t see what’s happening. It’s so fast. You put a line through the eye of the Moor and Hook, grab with the hook the mooring eye and before you know it, you have your line through the eye of the mooring. It’s great! Words don’t do much in this, so there are YouTube videos where you can see Hook and Moor in action.

This year, we used the moorings of Marrekrite a lot and man that is nice! No one is disturbing you. Waves of boats don’t have a big effect on the boat. It’s easy and calm. Marrekrite promised on the website that the moorings can handle a commercial ship with 12 bft. So, I sleep very nice on our small Casper with 6 bft on a mooring of Marrekrite.