When you’re moored beam-on to a gale of wind blowing off the wall and you just don’t have the muscle to heave the boat snugly in, try this:
Attach a line to the dock so that when you lead it to the middle of the shore line it makes something like a right angle. Take it round the line, bring it back to where you started and heave. As you do, the dock line will take on an increasingly indented vee shape and the boat will walk smartly in alongside by the ancient principle of ‘parbuckling’. Once the fenders are touching, either run out a new dock line or let go the parbuckle and have your mate snap up the slack in the dock line like lightning.
