>I have never boated in the PNW so I'm trying to understand this "Bull Rail" thing. What is the advantage to it over cleats? Is there something about boating up there that makes these Bull Rails work where cleats wouldn't? I must be missing something. Bull rails are real easy and cheap to construct. If you look at pictures of this area's maritime history you will get an idea of how hastily and crudely many of the docks were made. The folks building the canneries, floating lumber camps, temporary fish camps and so on just whacked docks together out of whatever pieces of wood they had lying around. The only hardware needed are some carriage bolts, washers, and nuts. A bull rail is a pretty easy thing to knock together. By the same token, it's a pretty easy thing to have come apart if it gets rotten or the fasteners rust out, so one needs to be cautious when tying to a very old, un-maintained bull rail dock around here. You can create other advantages to bull rails if you think about them a bit. If they run the whole length of the dock (which they usually do) they keep things like barrels, dock carts, kids, etc. from rolling off the dock. They accommodate any length of boat-- no matter where your cleats and hawses are on your boat, there is a bull rail beside them. You can add as many mooring lines to your boat as you want-- the rail is continuous. They are usually very substantial so assuming a rail is well built and secured to begin with it can hold a pretty heavy boat in pretty nasty winds. They are beefy and have numerous attach points to the dock-- the load is distributed over a wider area than with a cleat fastened down with a pair of bolts. They provide a step up to your boat's deck--- helpful on some boats, not on others. They can accommodate any diameter line up to the height of the space under the rail-- usually about four to six inches on docks used by recreational and fishing boats. You can't catch your foot on them and trip--- not that the folks who started building docks this way gave a hoot about the safety aspect. In the same vein, there is no danger of stepping or jumping to the dock and landing on top of a cleat. The rail is wood so it doesn't damage any part of a boat that happens to come up against it. But I think the real reason for their popularity is they are a holdover from the "old" days when they were a logical, simple, and versatile means of tying up any kind of boat that might want to tie up to it. Personally I like bull rails although cleats are faster to secure a line to. In our marina the older docks all have bull rails, but most of us have added cleats to the top of the rail where we want them. I have no idea how far south down the coast bull rails are popular, but they are the most common "mooring device" on marine and floatplane docks from Puget Sound north through BC, Southeast Alaska, and probably beyond. ______________________________ C. Marin Faure GB36-403 "La Perouse" Bellingham, Washington