Mooring lines and other long ropes

suse

suse

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How do people store their long lines avoiding the dreaded snakes' nest syndrome? Mine are currently flaked or coiled (depending on length) in a locker, but when I want to get one out from under the rest, everything wilfully and evilly gets knotted.

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Don't suppose this is of much help, but I get one of the paid hands to do that...

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Make a pin rail to fit at the side of the locker (a plank with an assortment of coat hooks will do). Fasten a loop of line under each hook. To put away a coil of rope, pass the loop through the coil and hook it on.

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Avoid kinks!

The really important thing is to coil with the lay of the rope and at all costs avoid kinks developing. Imagine if the rope had a stripe on one side along its length - this should be kept straight as you coil and not be allowed to spiral round and round the rope. There are various ways to achieve this, the simplest with shorter ropes is to hold the rope in one hand and give it a half-twist with the other as as each turn is taken up, shaking the twists from the bitter end right out through the end of the rope being .

With a very long rope, shaking out twists is impossible. A laborious but effective method is to lay the first turn on the deck, and then rotate this turn gradually taking up more and more rope until it is all in the coil.

The usual way to finish off is to flatten the coil, and take the bitter end three or four times around leaving just a small 'eye' at the top of the coil, push a bight of the bitter end through the eye, and then take the very end around and up through that bight to secure, pull tight.

For really long and thick, storm tactics ropes (<100m) this way of finishing isn't suitable. We have made individual canvas bags, roughly the dimensions of a thick tyre lying on its side, into which the rope can be coiled by feeding it round and round the edge of the bag. The mouth of the bag is then secured by a drawstring, from which the rope can be instantly run off.

At one time I remember suffering terribly from the rat's nest syndrome, but though we carry 15 or so long warps in our stern locker, flung in loose, these days amazingly every one comes out ready for use!
 
No matter how neat they store undoing the coil seems to set mine to knitting. I know for a fact that if you stuff a long halyard tail into a pouch it will always come out where as if you coil it in it knots up and won't run.

I keep a long line in a bucket and it always comes out a treat. With the others I try to leave enough time to fake the things down before use.

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Ha - yes, I've done all the usual things, except the bucket option and the coat hooks, and I really like the sound of the coat hooks. Recently I copied something from one of the mags a la mountaineers, looping to and fro, and then coiling round and round, etc, and certainly this worked. Perhaps if I combine this method with hooks I MIGHT have an answer.

BTW - the chap at the marina, when preparing to hurl quantities of rope across wide open spaces (used to be a trucker!), coils from the bitter end, and be damned to kinks further up - it all works when he throws the coils.

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Exactly what we do with spinnaker and ghoster sheets, pole downhaul, a couple of preventers, special mooring warps with patent hooks on their ends. Heavier warps take up too much locker entry area, so we always coil and loop each separately, then push them in after the fenders.

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We have a line of coat hooks screwed to the beam shelf in the forepeak, with short loops of codline on each - this works quite well but fails with one monstrous warp, which gets coiled down in its own locker. I agree with Andrew B, and for that reason, plus ease of splicing and whipping, I avoid braided rope - three strand coils so much better!

The two lines that I have trouble with are the heaving line and the lead line, both of which always need re-coiling before use.

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Try coiling your heaving lines as a figure-of-eight. If you think about it, normal coiling with that finger-and-thumb twist actually introduces a twist into the rope. Fine if it were uncoiled as if from a rotating reel, but we just pull the line off the coil thus giving an extra twist on each turn. Coiled in figure-of-eight fashion looks awkward, but throws much better.

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If you coil ropes as I described earlier, you will find the trapped bight at the top of the coil perfect for hooking onto a 'coathook' system.

The "Mountaineer's" and "Butterfly" coiling methods as used by climbers IMHO don't work well for ropes chucked in lockers. These methods are intended for ropes that have to be carried.
 
Re: Avoid kinks!

I use a variation on this: just take the bitter end through the 'eye', making sure you have a good 12-18" or so, and then attach the coil to the pushpit rail with a clove hitch in the bitter end. As the coils are always hanging, they never get tangled, and they're always to hand...

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