The many types of marine bollards

Cleat bollard

Cleat bollards are compact, small bollards generally used for small watercraft. You’ll see them on small docks and marina and on several places on the small watercraft themselves.

Cleat bollards  are a good choice for less experienced seafarer with a smaller boat to wrap their mooring line. Simple figure eights around the cleat are easy to manage with the smaller ropes used for small vessels. Cleats on the vessel are usually fastened by passing a loop through the center of the cleat and then over the “horns.”

One disadvantage to cleats is that the necessary wrap means being close to the bollard to get secure. Bollards, like the bitt bollard below, are designed to be “lassoed” easily, where a loop is thrown over them from a distance.

Single bitt bollards

Bitt bollards, or just bitts, are a venerable mooring bollard shape. It is often cross or lower-case t shaped, featuring a pole with two pegs jutting from either side. Bitts likely inspired the first cannon bollards to be buried on the wharf, in which trunnions acted as the side pegs. Bitt shapes are now both in cross-like posts or shaped with a wider top and slender bottom inspired by cannon shapes.

“Bitt” comes from a German word. “Bitt bollard” is a redundancy since bitt signifies a mooring post. Mariners may say bitt, bollard, or bitt-bollard when referring to this specific shape.

Bitt bollards can come in one or two posts. Double bitts often feature two parallel posts with a single long cross-post run through both.

Single bitts  are useful for throwing a looped hawser over without wrapping precision. They can hold multiple mooring lines. It handles high rope angles well, if the size of the bitt and the width of its pegs are sized appropriately for the rope’s thickness.

Double bitt bollards

Double bitts  are commonly used for larger vessels and variable tides, both on the vessel and off. The double bitt is usually hitched to like a cleat with a series of figure eights. (However, like all large-ship mooring, an experienced sailor will consider the fiber of the mooring line and the direction of strain, and will modify their approach appropriately.) One of the two bitts can be lassoed and from there further secured.

Tee and kidney bollards

Tee and kidney bollards are similarly shaped, though they are used in different ways. Both are short posts with a flat top that protrudes off the main stem.

With the T-top bollard, this lip juts out on only one side of the bollard post, away from the water. It looks a little less like the letter T than it does a bicycle seat, with the front of the seat flat to the post. The “back” of the bicycle seat is long enough to help trap a mooring line that moves to a higher angle, as with the tides.

The kidney bollard is similar, but generally has a lip on both sides, with one side slightly larger and bean shaped to help with mooring line positions.

Both can be used in heavy-duty applications, usually holding only one line: a large ship may more to many such bollards. However, kidney bollards are used in places without a huge range of tides as they have more tendency to slip.

Stag horn bollards

Stag horn bollards are often used for large commercial vessels on big wharfs—they are just a dock bollard, not one used on the boat.

Stag horns accept multiple mooring lines. The projected “horn” on these bollards and the complexity of the overall shape allows for extra security with a steep angle mooring rope. This bollard is therefore seen in places with fixed docks and high tides, or with ships that come in heavily laden to be unloaded.