The Four Numbers Every Marina Needs Before They Can Quote You

Ask ten marinas for a berth and you will get three replies, two of which say "how big is your boat?"

That is not obstruction. A marina genuinely cannot answer you without it. Berths are physical objects of fixed dimensions, arranged in a fixed layout, with a fixed depth of water over them. Until the office knows what shape you are, "do you have space?" is an unanswerable question — and the fastest way to get a real quote is to make it answerable in your first message.

Here is what they actually need, why each number decides something different, and how to put it together into an enquiry that gets a straight answer.

1. Length overall — and it is not the number in the brochure

Length overall (LOA) is the first thing every marina asks for, and the number almost every price list is built on. Berths are usually banded — up to 8m, 8–10m, 10–12m and so on — and you are charged for the band you fall into.

The mistake to avoid is quoting your model length. A "Bavaria 38" is not necessarily 38 feet on the water. Marinas mean overall: the extreme forward point to the extreme aft point, including anything permanently fitted. That means:

• a bowsprit or anchor platform
• stern davits, and the dinghy hanging in them
• a bathing platform, self-steering gear, or a pushpit-mounted outboard bracket

Boats regularly measure half a metre to a metre longer than their owners quote. If that pushes you into the next price band, the marina will find out when you arrive — and the conversation on the pontoon is worse than the one by email. Give them the honest overall figure.

2. Beam — the one that decides whether you fit at all

Length sets your price. Beam frequently decides whether the berth exists.

Most marina berths are finger pontoons: a walkway down one side, a fixed distance to the next finger. That gap does not stretch. A marina can often find a slightly longer berth than you asked for. It cannot widen one.

This matters enormously for multihulls. A 12m catamaran might be 7m across and will simply not go into a standard finger berth. Marinas that can take catamarans usually have a limited number of hammerhead or end-of-pontoon spaces, and those go early in the season. If you are on a cat, beam is the single most important number in your enquiry, and leaving it out guarantees a delay.

A marina manager in the Caribbean set out the requirement to us this week in exactly one line: length, beam, draught, and type — powerboat, catamaran or monohull. That was the whole list. Nothing exotic.

3. Draught — access, not just the berth

Draught rarely decides the berth. It decides whether you can reach it.

The binding constraint is usually somewhere other than the pontoon:

• A sill or a lock. Many harbours hold water behind a sill that only floods for a few hours either side of high water. Your draught sets your access window, and sometimes whether you can get in at all on a neap tide.
• The approach channel. Dredged channels silt up. The depth on the chart and the depth this season are different questions, and the harbourmaster knows the answer to the second one.
• Depth in the berth at low water. Some cheaper berths dry out or sit on soft mud. That is fine for a bilge-keeler or a lifting-keel boat, and unacceptable for a deep fin.

Give your actual laden draught, not the designer's figure. A cruising boat loaded for the season sits deeper than the brochure.

4. Boat type — because it changes everything above

Monohull, catamaran, motor yacht. It sounds redundant once you have given three dimensions, but it tells the marina things the numbers alone do not.

A motor yacht may need a heavier shore-power supply and will care about fuel-berth access. A catamaran needs a specific class of berth entirely. A monohull with a deep fin needs depth at all states of tide. A trailer-sailer or a RIB might be better served by a drying berth or a dry stack that the office would never think to offer otherwise.

Type is also how a marina judges how manoeuvrable you are. Putting a single-screw long-keeler stern-to in a crosswind is a different proposition to a twin-engine motor yacht with a bow thruster, and it can change which berth they offer you.

Two more things worth including

When, and how flexible you are. "Mid-August, and I can move a couple of days either way" gets a better answer than "August", because it lets them fit you around a booking they already hold.

How long. A night, a fortnight, a season and an annual contract are four different products at four different rates, often handled by different people in the office. Say which one you want.

What a good enquiry actually looks like

Everything above fits in five lines:

Hello — I'm looking for a visitor berth for three nights around 14–17 August, with a day or two of flexibility either side. Sirius is a Bavaria 38 monohull: LOA 12.1m including the bathing platform, beam 3.9m, draught 1.95m laden. Do you have space, and what would it cost? Happy to take an alternative date if that is easier. Thanks — Alex

That is answerable in one reply. The version without the numbers takes three emails and a week, and quite often never gets answered at all, because a busy office triages the easy questions first.

The part that is genuinely tedious

None of this is difficult. It is just repetitive — and the repetition is the real problem. If you are cruising an unfamiliar coast and want to compare four or five marinas, you write the same message five times, to five addresses you have to find first, and then you wait.

That is the job a BerthFinder berth request does: you give the four numbers and your dates once, and the request goes to the marinas in that area together, so the replies come back to one place and you can compare them side by side.

It does not make a full marina empty. Nothing does, in August. But it does mean the boats that fit hear back from the marinas that have room, without either side spending a week finding that out.

Know your four numbers before you ask. They are the difference between a quote and a game of email tag.