I left Naiad somewhat hastily after my last visit, Storm Ciarán had passed by during the night and I had to get home smartish and anticipated a wet return to shore due to the rain. There was, however, a break in the rain and I made use of this to get ashore and into the car before it started again. As a result I didn't stow things away and rig Naiad properly in that I didn't fit the bird netting. I'm not sure I would have been able to do that if I had not have been in such a rush since, although Storm Ciarán had passed, the wind was still quite strong and had I not been sheltered by Cobmarsh Island I would have hesitated to leave the boat.

So, I made a quick Visit to Naiad yesterday to finish the packing, so to speak. Normally, when I arrive at the mooring the first thing I do is to untwist the mooring lines, only this time they were not twisted at all, which was good news.

This is more or less how I left the mooring with four lines from the buoy to the boat. However, I did notice that all was not quite as it should be.

One of the lines has become untied from the buoy and you can see it trailing in the water. Fortunately, I had chained the end of the mooring spring to the buoy for exactly this eventuality and Naiad was still moored with four lines.

The foredeck does look a little cluttered, but that's better than having the boat break loose and drift away.

I used the dinghy to get close to the buoy and I was going to tie the line back again but I noticed that the chain was becoming very worn by the action of the salt water, so I took it and the springs off and tied the lines back to the buoy with the additional metalwork.

I also noticed that the outer braid of the black lines had become frayed. Above is a close up taken from the photo above the one above and I've circled the frayed areas so that you can see them. These two lines have a black outer braid and an inner core. The core provides the strength and the outer is there mainly to protect the core from chafe. As such the lines are safe as they are but need to be replaced.

Yet another task on the list.

I took the chain and springs home and here they are, cleaned up a little and laid out on a table.

The lower section of chain in the photo is fairly good, not rusty and probably didn't spend much time in the water. The upper section is very rusty and has had a lot of salt water splashing on it.

Further down the chain you can see why it needed to be replaced. The links on the lower chain are still full thickness but in the upper chain you can see that the links have worn away considerably. They get rusty from salt water spray, then the boat surges backwards and forwards and the motion causes the rust to wear off. New rust forms and get worn away and so the metal of the links is worn away by this repeated rust and chafe action.

I've decided that since the springs are not really suitable for a buoy mooring, they are for mooring to a pontoon or a jetty, I'm going to replace them with just ropes. These ropes will have a large eye at either end. One eye will be used to attach the line to the eye of the buoy and the other eye will drop over the sampson post.

So, the reel of rope is on order and I'm brushing up on my braid on braid eye splicing. 

Time for a cup of tea.