winterize my mooring
 

Getting ready to pull my Mooring for the season, Last year I tied a 3 gallon jug to chain and sunk couple of feet below surface,worked real well except had a difficult time finding it in spring, maybe to deep, is anyone doing anything different .

What always worked well for us when we had a mooring was to tie a 1/4" or 3/8" nylon line to the chain where it attached to the mooring ball (which we removed for the winter) and then run the line over to our dock or up onto the shore where we would tie it off to something secure. In the spring it was easy to follow the nylon line out to the chain in a canoe or rowboat and lift it up off the lake bottom, then re-attach it to the mooring ball.

Make sure the line/rope you attach to the chain is weighted so it stays on the bottom of the lake. Otherwise there is a good possibility that it will be cut by a springtime fisherman, or get caught in an ice flow and pulled somewhere else.

Rather than tying off to the shoreline, I sink mine near the shore in a area where I can reach it with an iron rake in the spring. This way it stays below the ice and doesn't get caught or cut.

Tying rope to dock sounds like best idea, I can get a rope that sinks as my mooring is about 150 feet away from dock. thanks for info.

One word of advice...I used to tie the chain off to the shore with rope, until one year, when trying to pull the rope in the spring I discovered a big sunken tree had settled right on top of the rope...was a nitemare trying to get it off.

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I guess I overdid it a bit last year but I bought a couple of Jim Buoy winter spar buoys. I got one to mark my mooring anchor and one to mark the raft anchor. They are tapered starting at a 6" diameter and 36" long. The taper is there so that when the ice moves, the bouy will just pull through and go under the ice. That's exactly what happened last winter to one of them and it worked as advertised with no damage to it. I did also use it once as a mooring when I had removed the regular mooring ball earlier in the fall. If I remember correctly, it cost around $60.

Saw this somewhere else and just had to share it.

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One Blue, One Red...
 

Something "different", but I don't recommend using swim noodles to support the line over winter.

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