AXYS has been designing, building, deploying, and recovering moorings since 1978 in lakes, rivers, coastal and offshore oceanic waters.

Our designs provide long operational lives with minimal annual servicing and typical Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) in excess of 6 years for our large operational buoys. All AXYS mooring designs are analyzed with numerical models that confirm a mooring's operational performance. These mathematical techniques, sound engineering practices, and years of experience to select the right mooring materials, result in long-life reliable moorings. These designs have been proven in the most aggressive oceanic environments in the world and consideration has specifically been given to durability of the mooring regarding a range of environmental challenges. Several moorings designed, built and deployed by AXYS in the Canadian buoy network are in excess of 4000m water depth and have been in service for over 12 years with annual upper mooring service.

Optimum design of a mooring is dependant on several factors including functional requirements, water depth, currents, tides, waves, vessel traffic, and fish bite in the vicinity of the mooring. There are numerous mooring designs available but moorings can be broadly categorized into Surface and Subsurface or a combination of the two.

• Surface moorings are used to secure floating platforms such as meteorological/oceanographic buoys. A typical surface mooring consists of an anchor, line or chain, and a surface floating platform. All-chain and inverse catenary are designs frequently used for surface moorings.
• Subsurface moorings secure instrumentation in place in the water column and/or on the bottom, with instrumentation frequently recovered using an acoustic release.

Moorings can also be built to include a combination of surface data collection and subsurface instrumentation integrated into the mooring line.

AXYS technologists and engineers have decades of collective practical experience in mooring design, deployment, and servicing for a very wide variety of instrumentation and buoys. AXYS holds an extensive library of proven mooring designs developed in-house and from other oceanographic institutes/users around the world. Mooring designs are checked on static and dynamic mooring simulation software to ensure optimal performance and survivability.

Allow us to design the best mooring for your application. Please contact us for more information.

Please see our Mooring Requirements Page for information, calculations, and recommendations on moorings for TRIAXYS™ Wave Buoys.

Watch a video of a 3 Metre buoy deployment with a chain mooring

Product Documentation

Met Ocean Moorings Data Sheet (PDF, 2.3 MB)

Please click on the links below for sample mooring diagrams:

7-22m TRIAXYS Mooring (PDF, 94 Kb)

100-150m TRIAXYS Mooring (PDF, 104 Kb)

3 Metre All Chain Mooring 75m (PDF, 74 Kb)

3 Metre Inverse Catenary Mooring 2300m (PDF, 79 Kb)

WatchKeeper buoy Inverse Catenary Mooring 125m (PDF, 86 Kb)