How to Find a Long-Stay Mooring: A Practical Guide

Before searching, write down your actual requirements — not your aspirations, your requirements. This list will stop you falling in love with a beautiful marina that doesn’t actually work for your boat or your life.

Your boat’s dimensions: Length overall (LOA), beam, and draught. These are hard constraints — a berth that doesn’t fit your boat isn’t an option regardless of anything else. Know your actual measurements, not the manufacturer’s brochure figures.

Waterway access: Where do you want to cruise? A canal marina is ideal if you’re a narrowboater, but useless if you want coastal passages. A tidal harbour suits a seagoing yacht but can’t be reached by a 2m air-draught narrowboat. Check that your vessel can actually navigate to and from the mooring you’re considering.

Shore access requirements: Will you be living aboard? Commuting from the marina? If so, how important is proximity to a train station or major road? For liveaboards, within walking or cycling distance of a supermarket and GP surgery is a basic quality-of-life requirement, not a luxury.

Budget: Set a realistic total monthly budget including mooring fee, electricity, navigation licence, insurance, and any parking. Don’t optimise for the cheapest headline rate and then discover the extras make it unaffordable.

Residential status: If you intend to live aboard, you need to know whether residential use is permitted before you waste time viewing a leisure-only site.

Online marketplaces: MoorHub lists long-stay berths from operators across the UK with standardised specs, photos, and pricing. You can filter by location, boat dimensions, mooring type, and contract length. This is the fastest way to generate a shortlist of options that actually match your boat — without calling individual marinas to ask basic questions.

Direct marina contact: For marinas not listed on aggregators, or when you want to ask about waiting lists and flex arrangements, calling or emailing the harbour master directly is still the most effective approach. Many smaller sites don’t maintain an active online presence but do have berths available.

Waiting lists: If you have a preferred location or marina, ask about their waiting list even if they have no current vacancies. Popular sites in London, the Solent, and major cities can have lists running one to five years — getting on early gives you the best chance of a berth when you actually need one.

Boating communities: Canal World forum, the Cruising Association, local boat clubs, and Facebook boating groups are all useful sources — particularly for swinging moorings, private berths, and sites that don’t advertise commercially. Word of mouth is how many of the best moorings are secured.

CRT home mooring search: If you’re looking for a CRT-managed home mooring on the canal network, the Canal & River Trust has its own online search tool for their managed sites and affiliated marinas.

Always visit a mooring before signing any agreement. Photos are useful for initial shortlisting but can be misleading — lighting conditions and camera angles flatter most settings. A visit tells you things no website can: the noise from a nearby road, the condition of the pontoons, the friendliness of the harbour master, and whether the site feels like somewhere you’d actually enjoy being.

Visit at different times of day if possible, and try to visit once on a weekday and once at the weekend — the character of a marina can change significantly between a quiet Tuesday morning and a busy Saturday afternoon. If you’re planning to live aboard, pay particular attention to the commute test: walk or cycle to the nearest bus stop or train station during the time of day you’d actually be doing it.

Talk to existing residents if you can. People who have moored at a site for a year or more will tell you things the harbour master won’t — both good and bad. A site with a happy, settled community of long-term moorers is usually a good sign.