How do you spend your time when you and your significant other aren’t speaking? For Phil Golding, the inventor of EziBuoy, it was the catalyst to create an idea ensuring he and his wife would never have the same fight again.
Golding’s wife, Mandy described the setting of the conflict where the couple was vacationing over Christmas around the island, Rocknest, off the coast of Perth, Australia. “It’s absolutely beautiful, unspoiled…it’s very small, but they’ve got the most beautiful bays,” said Mandy.
As the boat pulled up to the mooring buoy, “the whole bay was full and I was nervous and every time I went to pick up the mooring rope the wind shifted or the boat shifted,” explained Mandy, “and I missed it, so he’d have to go all the way around and do it again.”
On the third try Mandy lamented, “Not only I missed it—I dropped the whole boat hook in the water!”
“Sometimes when you’re trying to moor your boat and it doesn’t work out right it seems to be that the whole world is watching and just waiting for you to make a…mistake,” said Phil.
“He started screaming at me, I started screaming at him with everybody watching…We didn’t speak for three days!” exclaimed Mandy.
During that time Phil developed his rough concept for EziBuoy. “That’s how we got this magnetic buoy,” said Mandy.
The EziBuoy attaches to a magnetic fitting for a standard boathook pole for simple retrieval. The product enables anyone to help with the mooring regardless of experience— “It can be a teenager or a child…or even a guest on the boat who has never even been boating before,” said Mandy.
The Goldings debuted their first prototype for the Sydney International Boat Show, where it was named the product of the show. Since then the company went from being called Moorsmart to EziBuoy and the design has been modified for efficiency. “The top is fluorescent now,” described Mandy, “It glows in the dark.”
Although the Goldings are UK natives, they live in Australia and they have gathered firsthand research to assure that their product is relevant internationally. “We’ve been to Europe, we’ve been to Dubai, we’ve been to the States—everyone has the same problem,” said Phil, “People can drive their boats anywhere they want, but when they come up to a mooring it’s always very stressful, cause they’re relying on the person on the bow to try and hook the rope.”
According to the Goldings’ research, the three most popular boat hook sizes attachments have diameters of 25, 29 and 30 millimeters. Those three attachment sizes are included when purchasing an EziBuoy.
“No one knows there’s an EziBuoy, but everyone really needs one,” said Phil. The Ezibuoy website announced a newly appointed lead consultant for marketing to the US and Canada in October 2017.
4steps from mike smith on Vimeo.
Photos provided by Phil and Mandy Golding
