ShoreFasts—Part 2, Example Setups Plus Tips and Tricks

In Part 1 I covered the physics that govern shorefasts. Now let's move on to some example configurations and then some fun stuff: tips, tricks and hacks that make putting in shorefasts safer and easier. And, yes, I deliberately put the fun tips at the end so you would have to read through more theory to get to them—no cheating now. Seriously, do read carefully. I learned a huge amount, as well as trashing several of my long-held assumptions, while putting together the diagrams for this chapter.

Never Two Points

But, first off, let's expand on why we pretty much always need more than one shorefast and an anchor. (There is one exception, which I will get to later.) I'm guessing that most of you already figured it out from Part 1, and that just goes to show the importance of properly analyzing these things, rather than relying on common practice, like I did when I used to use just one shorefast and an anchor. (I like that excuse better than the other option: I'm a dummy.) Anyway, the reason is that there are two vital requirements to make shorefasts work safely:

• We need to avoid small shorefast angles, like that in the graphic above.
• On the other hand, we need to take slack out of the system to reduce impact loads from the boat slamming back and forth caused by multi-directional gusting—common in small anchorages.

So let's look at adding more shorefasts and/or anchors: