35 moorings at Kubbar: tie up to a buoy, don’t drop anchor on the coral
A volunteer dive team's project also marks the island's shallow edges for boats.
The Kuwait Dive Team, a volunteer environmental group, has fitted 35 moorings around Kubbar Island. Each mooring is a buoy fixed to the seabed: you tie your boat to it instead of throwing an anchor or grapnel onto the reef, where it snaps the coral.
If you take a boat to Kubbar
- Tie up to the nearest mooring rather than anchoring over the reef.
- The buoys also mark the safe edge of the shallows, so staying with them keeps your hull off the bottom.
- The team says they help keep drifting debris, such as fishing nets, off the coral too.
The project and the island
The project began in 1997 and now runs to 130 moorings across Kuwait’s coral sites, according to the team’s head of marine operations, Waleed Al-Shatti. Kubbar lies 30 kilometres off the Zour coast; it is 370 metres long and 300 metres wide, ringed by reef from 2 to 20 metres deep.
The rules on marine protection and navigation safety are enforced by the Coast Guard, the Environment Public Authority and the Public Authority for Agriculture Affairs and Fish Resources.
Photo: boats moored off Kubbar Island’s beach in August 2013, before the new moorings. Photograph by Kubbar, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Kuwait Dive Team, as reported by KUNA and Al-Anba, 16 October 2026.
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