The present study is an attempt to re-assess the level of reliability of the mooring system of an existing Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) unit in West Africa. The study made use of field data for the environment including wind, waves and current together with simultaneous measurements of the FPSO offset and of the mooring line tensions. Three different approaches to predict the extreme response are compared. More specifically, the traditional design method is compared with Response Based Design (RBD) and First Order Reliability Method (FORM) analysis associated with Response Surface Models (RSM) of the moored FPSO. The results of this case study allow assessing the level of conservatism that is currently embedded in classical design rules.