Taylor Made Sur-Moor T3C 18" Mooring Buoy, White/Blue

If you keep a boat on a mooring, the buoy is the one piece of gear you look at every single time you come and go. The Taylor Made Sur-Moor T3C 18-inch is built for exactly that job. It's a white buoy with a blue reflective stripe, 18 inches across, 57 inches around, and it floats with 100 pounds of buoyancy in sea water. That's enough lift to keep a real mooring pennant and chain from ever pulling it under.

The T3C name tells you how it's rigged. Tube-Through-Center. There's a 2-1/2 inch tube molded straight through the middle of the buoy, so your mooring line runs right through it instead of clipping to an eye on the surface. We like this design a lot. The load stays on the line, not on the shell, and the buoy is free to ride and spin without a hard point wearing through. It's the setup you see on well-kept moorings up and down the coast.

Construction is straightforward and honest. A closed-cell foam core inside a tough polyethylene shell. The foam is what really matters here. Even if the outer shell takes a hard hit from a dock or a passing hull and cracks, that closed-cell core doesn't waterlog. It keeps floating. A lot of cheaper hollow buoys are done the day they crack. This one isn't.

So what boat is it right for? The 100-pound buoyancy figure puts the Sur-Moor T3C in a sweet spot for boats roughly in the 25 to 35 foot range, powerboats especially, sitting on a standard mooring in protected or semi-protected water. If you're on a bigger boat, or you moor somewhere with strong current or a lot of surge, plan on more flotation. Plenty of owners run two buoys in series on heavier boats to carry the extra chain weight and keep the pennant riding high. There's no shame in going bigger. A buoy that's fighting to stay up is a buoy that's working too hard.

Let's talk rigging, because this is where a mooring lives or dies. Run a proper three-strand nylon rode through that center tube, half-inch or larger, and add a length of chafe guard where the line passes through. That tube is polyethylene, and a thin, hard line worked back and forth by wind and tide will saw at it over a season. Give it a fatter line and some protection and it'll last for years. Down at the bottom of the pennant we'd add a galvanized swivel so the boat can turn on the tide without twisting the rode into knots. Don't shackle steel hardware straight against the shell. Let the line and the swivel do the work.

The blue reflective stripe isn't just for looks. Come into your mooring field at dusk or after dark and that stripe throws your spotlight back at you, so you can pick your buoy out of a crowd before you're on top of it. Like anything that lives outside in the sun and salt, the finish will age. A quick freshwater rinse now and then and keeping it stored out of direct sun in the off-season will keep the color and the reflective stripe looking sharp a lot longer.

One last note on storage and handling. That polyethylene shell will take a permanent dent if you leave the buoy sitting hard on a trailer bunk or a sharp edge all winter. Stand it up or lay it on something soft when it's out of the water. Treat it right and the Sur-Moor T3C is the kind of gear you rig once and stop thinking about, which is exactly what you want from a mooring buoy.