Taylor Made Sur-Moor T3C 15-Inch Mooring Buoy, White/Blue Stripe

Taylor Made has been building mooring buoys for a long time, and the Sur-Moor T3C is the one you see holding boats on moorings up and down the coast. This is the 15-inch model, and it's a simple, honest piece of gear. A closed-cell foam core wrapped in a tough polyethylene shell, with a 2-inch tube running straight through the center so your mooring chain passes right through it. No hardware to rust out, no bladder to lose air. It just floats and does its job season after season.

The numbers on this one are straightforward. You get 15 inches of diameter, 47 inches around, and 60 pounds of buoyancy in sea water. That buoyancy figure is the one that matters most when you're picking a buoy. Sixty pounds is a good fit for center-consoles, small sailboats, and mid-size runabouts on a protected mooring. If you're floating something in the 20-foot-plus range and you see real chop where you keep the boat, you'll want to think about a larger buoy or a second float to carry the weight of the chain and pendant. Undersizing a buoy is the most common mistake we see, and it shows up as a buoy that rides low and disappears in a following sea.

The tube-through-center design is what makes this style so easy to live with. Your mooring chain runs up through the 2-inch center tube, so the buoy carries no side load and can't roll off the rode. It also lets you adjust how the buoy sits on the chain, which is handy when you're dialing in scope for your depth and tide swing. One tip from years of watching these on moorings: size your chain so it isn't sloppy inside the tube, and a couple of rubber washers or a short length of hose over the chain at the tube ends keeps things quiet and stops the shell from wearing at the contact points. Sharp chain links slapping bare polyethylene is the one thing that'll shorten this buoy's life, so give it a little thought at rig-up.

Because the core is closed-cell foam and not an air chamber, a puncture won't sink it. That's the big advantage of a foam-core buoy over an inflatable float. Nick the shell on a dock or a prop and the buoy keeps floating. The polyethylene shell shrugs off UV and salt, and the white body stays visible in daylight without much fuss. For rigging, we'd steer you toward hot-dip galvanized chain and a nylon pendant. Keep dissimilar metals to a minimum so you don't get staining bleeding onto the white shell over a season.

The blue reflective stripe is there for a reason. Come back to your mooring after dark and a clean stripe throws your spotlight right back at you, which makes finding your boat in a crowded field a lot less stressful. Keep it clean. Algae and waterline scum will dull the reflectivity faster than anything, so a quick scrub when you're aboard keeps it working. Some owners add a topping of marine-grade reflective tape after a few seasons once the factory stripe has taken its share of sun. That's an easy touch-up, not a repair.

So who's this buoy for? Anyone setting or refreshing a mooring for a small to mid-size boat who wants a no-nonsense float that'll ride out the season. It's not the buoy for a heavy trawler or a big cruiser in an exposed anchorage. For those you'd step up in size. But for the majority of moorings out there, this 15-inch Sur-Moor is exactly the right amount of buoy. Buy it once, rig it right, and forget about it until haul-out.