Clearing a rope around the prop.

Montemar

Montemar

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Has anyone jumped off the back of their boat and gone down to cut rope off the prop. and prop. shaft?
A safety line and someone on the boat would be highly desirable.
Is it foolhardy or a viable option when without any drive and needing to move?
 
A colleague of mine did this. Ended in tears, rescued by the RNLI and carted off to hospital for stitches when he slashed his wrist with the knife underwater.
 
We picked up a rope on the way from Guernsey to St Malo a few years back. I had diving gear on board and my first thought was to go under and free it. It was a fairly calm day, but in open water there is nearly always some swell and who knows whether another craft will pass by and create a wake while you are underneath. I only had my family on board, and decided that an inconvenience could quickly turn into a drama if I got bashed on the head by the sterngear, so we diverted to Jersey on one engine instead.

I'd do it as a last resort, or in the safety of a protected anchorage, but would prefer to limp home or get towed if poss.
 
Got a mooring line caught in my prop once. My fault but trying to cut it out under water even with a sharp knife proved to be extremely difficult and took a good couple of hours. And this was with the legs raised and tackling the job from a tender. The rope wraps so tightly you end up just hacking at it.

On a side note and one that nearly ended in disaster......"I think she's just about cut through, see if you can strip the rest out by putting it in gear" Those words should probably have been appended with drop the legs first. The resulting rooster tail was enough to all but knock the knife wielding jockey well clear of the tender. Cold water and clear thought are not the best of bed fellows.
 
Much safer to fit an effective ropecutter. Dangerous going in the water except iftied up securely in a marina.
 
We were lucky enough to have someone with a small remote control sub with cutting claws who managed to sort out my neighbours rope around the prop issue however like the other comments on this thread I don't think I'd like to dive under in open waters - thats the advantage of two engines of course - but if I had to I think I probably would.
 
A friend of mine has a great tale of diving under a Nelson in the North Sea in a F7 while taking part in the first round Britain power boat race to clear a fishing net, hearing the story does not encourage me to try same!

For me it's a easier job.. Although we have a protected skeg and rope cutters we also have a prop hatch that can be opened at sea to clear a fouled prop:

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If you are lucky.

IF there is sufficient rope to grab hold off it is possible to sort the problem if conditions allow.
On recent trip one of the engines simply stopped dead.
Investigation showed a rope trailing the boat had gone round the prop.
Two options, a tricky single engine sulk back to base and a lift out or have a go solving the problem,there and then.
Fortunate in having another able bodied crewmember aboard we decided on a simple plan.
Being a boat of an earlier generation,everything is visible and easy to access.
Finding a decent sized socket to fit the nuts on the flexable coupling,moved shaft back and forth to find out which way would unwind the rope.
While one of us rotated the shaft, the other pulled on the rope and announced which shaft direction released more of the rope from the prop blades.
Took about 20 mins of faffing about to remove the blighter.
 
Montemar said:
Has anyone jumped off the back of their boat and gone down to cut rope off the prop. and prop. shaft?
A safety line and someone on the boat would be highly desirable.
Is it foolhardy or a viable option when without any drive and needing to move?
Click to expand...

I would not want a safety line on me unless I had breathing gear. If it gets tangled you could be in big trouble.
 
A delivery trip I was on with another skipper led us to having to dive in a wetsuit to clear both props in a force 5 in the middle of the Bay of Biscay 100 miles from nearest help.
The skipper was a young fit ex diver and it took nearly three hours to clear them and by that time he was exhausted and suffering signs of hypothermia. I could not of physically done what he did. All I could do was keep watch supply hot drinks and encouragement . We tried a wide variety of different knives and saws and in the end the best knife was a serrated domestic bread knife. Worked better than his divers knife various sheaf type knives hacksaws pad saws and tenon saw. The rope was round both props was at least 1 inch diameter and melted in to a solid mass between the props and stern gear. Probably at least 30 to 40 metres of it in total.
The alternative didnt bear thinking about as we could not raise anybody by VHF.
Not something you would want to do by choice.
 
I appreciate that you are asking re shafts- I am on drives, but having had this several times now, the issue is just how much the stern of the boat is moving up and down in any sort of seas. Drives might be a bit further aft and so moving more, but they are not under the boat as shafts. Both cases are pretty dangerous, either way.
Last case ,bizarely, was 15 miles south of IOWight,two bouys with a floating line between them. WTF that was doing there...fortunately, the line held above the props, but it was still pretty hard in messy seas to get it out from in front of the drives.
 
I came into such situation 3 times:

#1 in Finland, stern anchor rope got entangled between both props of the duoprop. Water was very cold and I had to give up after 15 min. being completely frozen. The diver we called needed 45’ to finish the job. So no chance to do it myself. Waters were calm and the boat was anchored on its main anchor. On the boat were my mother and my father (who was holding me with a rope). Apart from the water temperature, it wasn’t a dangerous situation.

#2 in the BVIs, with the painter tangled in the saildrive while we were trying to pick up a buoy in a breeze at Lee Bay anchorage on Salt Island. Since we were being pushed to the shore, I jumped into the dinghy with a big kitchen knife (and nearly punctured the dinghy/myself) and tried to pull the SY away which was impossible until I eventually realized that we had actually chartered a SAILboat so we sailed to Salt Pond Bay and our anchoring maneuver without engine turned to be quite successful. Untangling was not very difficult, but during the concomitant apéro I lost my sight glasses overboard. Depths of 5-6m. prevented me to effectively search the seabed. Friendly americans from the next diving boat found them in less than 10’ .
Dangerous was only the exercise of jumping in the dinghy with the knife, and the towing attempt. My wife was alone on board and not experienced with boats at the time.

#3 near the fortress of Sibenik in Croatia, caught a nasty rope floating 50cm. under the water surface in the middle of the bay. The winds were pushing us against the shore, so I decided to cross the canal on one engine in order to assess the situation in a place where we would be securely attached alongside a moored boat. Went underwater and nearly fainted when I saw that the rope embracing one of my props was completely tight. I had towed the rope weight on the seabed all the way, hence the very strange behavior of the boat. I cut the rope, heard the weight falling on the seafloor and rushed inside to check whether we had a water ingress which was luckily not the case. 2 hours later we were towed into a marina and spent the night in the slings of the travel lift. The boat being checked the next day and everything was OK (I feared damaged struts and bent shaft).
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What I learn from it:
- Bread knifes are the most efficient to liberate a prop
- It’s a stressful situation, and in the hurry one could make wrong decisions and take too many risks. Having since then gained more experience I hope I would handle in a more mindful way in the future.
- In any case, I would not fiddle on the props in open waters, or it must be a flat calm day.
 
A few times...
January in Milford Haven..... boy was it cold (no wetsuit), still get accused of doing it deliberately so as to break into the boat's rum store!

In the BVI's when swmbo reversed over the dinghy painter..... several trips under with a bread knife, resulted in lots of cuts on my back from barnacles under the hull with consequent bleeding. On the final dive I was confronted by a 6' shark coming round the keel having smelt the blood. Amazing how one can levitate!
 
Been there and 'got the T Shirt' as they say.

Both times with a shaft drive boat and luckily untangled ourselves without getting wet at all.

If there's a decent tail to the rope that's reasonably long you can try and put as much pulling pressure on it whilst another person and just slips into gear the reverse way of what the original direction of travel was. So, if you were going forward when you snagged the rope then just keep nudging into reverse for about 1 sec at a time and you may just find the rope will untangle itself. It's a bit daunting on your first attempt but it's doable as I found out. If you've really wound the rope up tight then probably little chance this will work but worth a try.
I saved a potentially ruined weekend away twice and a few quid on diver's too. Hopefully this might work for someone else one day.
 
On last boat hit a fishing net and lost one drive completely and the other couldn't remove the net with the useless knife I had on board. Got towed into Yarmouth and bought a sailing knife designed for cutting ropes quickly. Fishing net removed in ten minutes by leaning over the bathing platform.

Last year caught a lobster pot round me shaft/props. Think it was 8 mm nylon. Had to dive 8 times to get it off. Glad I had the knife. Not sure if I would have managed with a thicker or more tangled rope. I'm reasonably fit but diving under rudders and under hull takes more effort then you think.

Also hired a Bavaria 50 in france, notices we'd caught a sheet round the prop while we were at anchor. Dove over the side with a knife but the rope had been cut by the prop, just had to unwind twice round the leg and it was free.

Def carry a stainless steel knife designed for the job and don't use it for anything else so its sharp when you need it.
Do not tie a rope round yourself, asking for trouble.
Also have some goggles on board.
 
I've swum down with a chisel to scrape barnacles off the prop, while anchored in the Solent, so I know it can be done as long as the wrap isn't so bad as to need power-tools. Whether it's a good idea would depend on the conditions at the time.

My plan would be to sling a warp under the hull from side to side as a handhold, and to use a safety line but with a snap-shackle quick-release just in case it somehow gets tangled (not that there's much for it to get tangled on). If the boat's pinned in place by a pot line, I'd also put a fender on a long warp and allow it to drift, as a last chance just in case I get separated from the boat which won't be able to follow me. Obviously if there's a strong tide I wouldn't be getting in, but water is rarely completely stationary.

Pete
 
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