New device helps haul moorings

Steve Pixley with The Harbormaster Tool. Steve Cartwright

arbormaster Steve Pixley has been hauling mooring chain in Camden harbor for the past seven years, one short section at a time, to see if it needs replacing. There’s got to be a better system, he remembers thinking. "I was tired of hauling chain the old way."

So he invented The Harbor Master Tool, a device to haul boat and buoy moorings faster and with less effort. It’s designed for harbormasters, and so far Pixley has sold a handful of his tools to customers such as Rockland Harbormaster Ed Glaser and Portland Harbormaster Jeff Lick. Pixley tried out his invention and found it cut in half the time he spent hauling moorings.

His specialized tool slides down the underwater chain to the bottom, then grabs the chain as a lobster pot-hauler winches the chain to the surface. For heavier moorings, Pixley uses a crane on a barge. Even then, his tool often comes in handy, although he acknowledged, "we’ve got ones I can’t lift."

A patent is pending on the Harbor Master Tool, and Rockport Steel is producing the device for Pixley, who recently lowered the price from $200 to $150 apiece. He hopes sales will take off, he said, as word spreads along the coast.

Before becoming Camden harbormaster, Pixley, 40, skippered the windjammers Grace Bailey and Mercantile for eight years. Before that, he was captain of the schooner Appledore, and the Hudson River sloop Clearwater. He and his wife, Ann, have a four-month-old son, Henry.