How high should your fenders hang?

A fender set too high protects the pushpit while your hull grinds the quay. Too low, it dips in the water, grows a beard of weed and rides up at the first wake. The right height is neither universal nor permanent: it depends on what you’re moored against, and it changes through the day.

The basic rule

The fender must bear on the widest part of the hull, at the potential contact point with the obstacle — not above, not below. In practice:

Floating pontoon: the pontoon rises and falls with you. Set the fender to bear at pontoon height, roughly one-third immersed for low pontoons. The setting holds through the whole tide.
Fixed quay: the trap. With a 4-metre tidal range, the contact point moves constantly. Either come back and readjust, or accept a compromise — fender at mid-hull, knowing it will bear imperfectly at high and low water.
Rafted alongside another boat: fenders go at the widest beam, at the height where the two hulls meet — usually higher than against a quay. Rig some on both sides if your neighbour is poorly equipped.
Lock: high, dirty, abrasive walls — fenders high, plus a fender board if you carry one.

Why nobody actually does it

Because with knots, every adjustment means untying two half hitches, guessing the new length, retying, checking — multiplied by the number of fenders. So we set them “roughly right” on arrival and never touch them again. The hull pays the difference.

That’s the problem a self-locking cleat hanger like FENDLOCK solves: the line runs through the cleat, height adjusts to the millimetre with one hand, and it locks instantly. Correcting a fender after a motorboat’s wake takes two seconds, without untying anything.

Three checks before leaving the boat

Contact point: push the boat toward the quay — does the fender touch first, on its widest half?
Tide: in 6 hours, will the contact still land on the fender?
Boat movement: ferry wakes, crosswind — does the fender stay put when the boat moves?

Thirty seconds of attention when you leave, an unmarked hull when you return.