What would you do if you snagged a rope?

Gosh - I thought you were kidding. You are kidding me aren't you?

Well if you are, I am going reply anyway and look stoopid, coz I don't really mind looking stoopid in the name of safety at sea.

Ropes are generally discarded by thoughtless (lazy, actually) commercial fishermen who just chuck all their rubbish overboard out at sea. This includes plastic bags that go round your cooling water intakes and blow your motors up, old rope (not money for) and worse still cargo nets that really do tangle things up. A large piece of rope will likely stop an engine, a cargo net certainly will.

The rest of the descriptions on here deal with how to remove the dratted stuff.

Carry a hacksaw!
 
Re: What happened was...

On entering the Alderney race, sea calm, tide slack, we snagged a floating pot rope which was being trailed over 150 metres from the marker buoy. Suddenly saw the rope, and then saw the rope being drawn under the boat. Throttles into neutral instantly. But the weight of the boat kept it going - thoughts of the shaft being ripped out. Not knowing which prop was snagged, or even both, no reverse used in case it worsened the problem or even caused a Spanish windless effect (which would have pulled the shafts together). Eventually slowed down and found the stbd prop was fouled. Tried a bit of reverse, but no joy at all. Cut as much as poss off, and limped to Guernsey on one engine. Diver hacked the rope off (loads of it) and found no damage - thankfully. And thankfully, the sae was calm.
 
Happens far too often - I find bits of fishing net the worst and like others I always have face mask, wetsuit (I'm stingy) and a good breadknife on a rope.

I'm a fan of having at least two means of propulsion and being a raggie that means that I'm guarenteed only to have to go over the side in a flat calm. Have a two engined boat seems a pretty good tactic too, but I suppose you could be enormously unlucky and snag both.

Oh, and don't worry - if your propellor snags a rope, you will hear it and feel it.
 
Thanks Mr Snelson,

It was a genuine question and a realy great answer. I have been searching some old posts and am now getting a much better feel for it. Why aren't there anti-pollution laws about dumping old nets and ropes at Sea?

Thanks again,

A Novice Mr T. /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif
 
Happy to help Mr T!

Don't worry, it doesn't happen too often, only once to me so far in 5 years, and I reckon to rack up about 600 nm per year. This forum is all about sharing knowledge and experience and I cannot recount the number of times that I have been helped by others on here over the years.

Happy boating!
 
Hi Piers,

My Immediate action would be to engage neutral and then in turn try to engage reverse to see if the rope could be spun off my prop. Hopefully this would also tell me which prop was fouled and just how badly. After that, well that depends on the situation!

Barry
 
As I sail in waters which are full of all kinds of debris (tidal Thames) I have bought a boat with an outboard in preference to an inboard.

I had a prop wrap recently whilst using a race support dory and it only took a couple of minutes to raise the engine and remove 10 feet of rope from the prop.

Local ferry man is always getting junk on his prop. Outboard is essential for him.
 
Quote:

Also, I always have a dry suit and fleece on board, in case I have to get into the water (don't forget to anchor first)



[/ QUOTE ]

Please do forget to anchor first, otherwise the tide may take you away from the boat.

Why do people assume that it's fishermen who throw this junk over? (As someone else suggests in this thread). We spend more time at sea than the leisure sector, we have valuable commercial sea time to lose, and we are equally likely to get fouled up, or more , in view of our increased exposure.
 
probably because most leisure boats don't go around with miles of blue or orange polyprop rope strewn over their decks, leisure boats don't lay lobster pots either.

Not saying that it's your fault but I bet at least 50% of ropes and nearly all nets are from fishing boats. The rest are chucked in by people onshore.
 
Sorry fisherman, clearly I was generalising and meant no offense. Around N Wales, it is commercial vessels that dump, but I do know for certain that most are foriegn - Spanish or Italian because all the empty plastic bottles and other discarded rubbish have foreign writing, which I recognise the language of.

I always use a link line from me to the boat - a point I forgot to mention.
 
when they took the engine out, the service peeps put loads of plkastic down to protect everything nicely. I turned up one moring wghen everything back in and they were clearing up...and chucking the big sheets of plastic in the sea! I went a bit bonkers attem, and they hastily retired. So it could also be people who work near the sea and treat it as a handy cheap skip.
 
Its not only mobos that get caught.
I had a rope round the rudders of my 26 foot Firebird sailing cat in the south side of the IOW during one of the big Round the Island Races. It ruined the day by buggering up the helm.
We were only doing about 7 or 8 knots but still got caught. I'm reasonably sure that this was a lobster pot with lines floating on the surface.
 
It's a fact, every fisherman I have spoken to has experienced rope round props, with a range of consequences. Most liesure boats have had less incidents. They are as unhappy about rubbish as any of the liesure boats, in many ways more so. Their boats are not toys but a means to an income.

Yachts have far less of a problem as they don't motor so much. Engine hp is less so less damage is caused and they have an alternative source of power. It can still ruin your day though.
 
The rule used to be that a vessel could dump it's rubbish once it was 25nm, either from port limits or outside national limits. When in port you would see the forty gallon drum hitched to the rail aft. Of course, in the western approaches everything comes straight back on the southwesterlies. I have several times picked up a whole beam trawl belly, which would have been ripped off on a snag, which took two lifts of my landing derrick to get up on the quay.
 
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