As is sometimes the way of things, this post just caused a long forgotten memory to surface.
We once sailed the boat with the Dutchman system to Holland. And as luck would have it, we broke one of the filaments on the passage over. Off we went to the chandlery to look for something suitable. The typically helpful chandlery staff saw that we were English and came over to help, asking what it was we were looking for.
"Something suitable to hang my dutchman from" whilst holding up a length of very strong, but very broken, "fishing line" was quite the translation issue....
