Taylor Made Sur-Moor 22171 Mooring Buoy, 15 in White/Blue Stripe

The Taylor Made Sur-Moor 22171 is a 15-inch foam-filled mooring buoy built to float your mooring pennant right where you can reach it and mark the spot so you can find it every time you come back. It's white with a blue stripe, and that stripe is reflective, so it shows up under a spotlight when you're feeling your way back to the mooring after dark. If you keep a boat on a permanent mooring, this is the piece that lives at the surface and does the quiet work of holding everything up.

Here's what's going on inside. The core is closed-cell foam, and the outside is a molded polyethylene shell. That combination matters more than it sounds. Closed-cell foam doesn't soak up water the way open-cell foam or a hollow air chamber can. So even if the poly shell takes a scuff against a piling or picks up a crack from years of dock rash, the buoy keeps floating. There's no single air chamber to puncture and no slow waterlogging that quietly kills the float over a season. You get 60 pounds of buoyancy in sea water, which is enough to carry the weight of a typical mooring pennant and top chain and still ride high at the surface.

Why does riding high matter? Because a buoy that sits low is a buoy you can't grab. When you come in single-handed on a windy afternoon, you want the pennant loop sitting up out of the water where you can hook it on the first pass. A 15-inch buoy with real reserve buoyancy gives you that. The 47-inch circumference also gives you a decent visual target from a distance, so you're not squinting across a crowded mooring field trying to pick out your spot.

The blue reflective stripe earns its keep at night. Anyone who's tried to find their mooring after a late run home knows the feeling of sweeping a light across black water hoping something bounces back. The reflective stripe gives your spotlight something to catch, so the buoy lights up instead of disappearing. During the day the white body and blue stripe read clearly against the water too.

This is a mooring buoy, so let's be clear about what it isn't. It's not a boat fender, and it's not a throwable life ring. It's the surface float for a mooring system. It's a good fit for boat owners running a seasonal mooring, small marina and yacht club crews maintaining a field of moorings, and anyone who wants a durable, foam-filled float that won't quit if it takes a knock. If you're on a larger boat with heavy ground tackle, size your buoy to the load, since a bigger, heavier pennant may want more flotation than a single 15-inch buoy provides.

Taylor Made has been building marine hardware for a long time, and the Sur-Moor line is their answer to mooring flotation. The foam-and-poly build is meant to live outdoors, in the sun and salt, season after season. Give the shell a rinse when you service your mooring and check it for cracks or heavy chalking the way you'd check any gear that lives on the water full time. Treated right, a buoy like this earns its spot on the mooring for years.

One more practical note. Because the buoyancy comes from foam, not air, there's nothing to inflate and no valve to fail. You pull it out, rig it into your mooring, and it does its job. That simplicity is the whole point. Fewer parts to fail means fewer surprises the day you splash the boat. And when the season wraps up, it stores just as easily, since there's nothing to deflate or dry out before it goes in the shed for the winter.