Hello there, my name is Jon Mendez and this is one of our How To videos with
Motor Boat & Yachting. One of my personal things that I find a
struggle with nowadays is seamanship and looking after ropes and how to put them
away when we're done with them. Quite often now you open the locker on the
boat and you just see a huge tangled mess of what was rope, and that's the
most important thing that we have on the boat for keeping it safe when we tie it
up, so we're just going to do a little bit on what to do and how to make them
reasonably looked after. Here we've got two basic types - we've got free strand
and we've got some braid on braid in a couple of lengths. I'm just going to show
you how to coil them. Either coil them and finish so we're going to
tie them up, or coil them and finish so we're going to put them in a locker, but
how to make it so that when you take it out it's usable, so all I've done is just
separate them into three piles and we'll start with this free strand, and this has
got a ready-made loop spliced in the end of it, so if it's got one of those I
always tend to start with that, and depending if you're left or right-handed
all you really want to do is coil onto your left hand if possible, and the
reason for that with three strand is the rope is made with a twist in it, so it
wants to be rolled in a clockwise direction every time you make a loop, so
by that I mean hand open, and I use my elbow in to the side of me and my arm as
a measure, so my arm makes one length, so just roll over, and what I'm doing is
rolling my hand to put the loop on, one measure, one roll, one measure, one roll,
one measure etc. until I get almost to the end. Now I've got a a nice long bit
left, so to finish this off, if I just chuck that in the locker now it
become a tangled mess again, so what I want to do is round the back, and I use
my little finger there just to hold it, spin round, and this time I'm going to
cross over, what that does is it just stops it falling off, now if it's just
going in a locker for me, after I've done a couple I can take the end straight
through the loop
and just poke,
so just to poke through, it's fine for just dropping it in your locker, if
you're going to be using it the same day, but if you come back to that and the
locker had lots of stuff going in and out of it, it's going to end up coming undone,
and you end up with a bird's nest, so a better way to finish it and for something a bit
more permanent, is to take your end and make a little loop in your finger and
push the loop through, so we've got a loop coming through now, as opposed to
just an end, flick that loop over the top and then pull tight, and you've locked
the whole end of the rope really nicely. That can go in the locker, all sorts of
things can happen, it will pull out, and to use it we just ease the end, flick the top
off, and your rope's ready to go. Our third option is you might actually want to
hang the rope up. I prefer that because it allows it to dry, allows a lot of the
salt to evaporate out of it, and you end up with a nicer rope to use next time. So a
little way to do that is, rather than just poke the end through, go for the
loop again, so pop the loop through and as the loop appears, instead of
putting it over the top, take your loose end and put it through,
so we end up with that arrangement where it's held nice and tightly, and now we've
got enough to tie it up, so over and under, and there she is, tied up. This
variety here is what's called a braid on braid, and it's brilliant for mooring
because it's got a much harder outer and that wears better, so if there's any chafe it's
much better than three strand. The difficulty is that you can get it in
two varieties, sailors buy this for halyards ,which mustn't have any stretch
in it, and we want the mooring variety, which does have stretch, so make sure you
talk to your rope man, get the right sort. To coil it's exactly the same process,
the little twist at the top is not quite so important, but in reality just use it
in the same technique and you'll get the same effect, same technique to finish,
little twist across, use up any extra twists, and then
depending how you're going to stow it, we'll pop the little loop through, pull up
and we can either pop that in a locker or tie it out. So the coiling techniques
work great with ropes that are not too long or not too thick, but when you get
to something like this, this comes off a 60 footer, it all gets a bit heavy, and if
I try and do this in the same technique, by the time I get to pretty much the
fourth one, I'm starting to run out of hand and it's also getting quite heavy, if
it's wet I'd be really struggling, so a better technique is lay it down, so we
can just then, it's a bit more involved and a bit more fiddly, but we get the
same effect, and that's one way to do it, obviously you can do all of those, then
you just pick the end up and tie it around, and that works fine, but actually
if there's something to hang it on, that for me is the best of all, so I'm just
going to use this nice gate, make my coils pretty much the same, and you can
see I've got loads of rope, I'll just keep going, I would struggle to hold this
in my hand, it's of a size where it's physically getting quite difficult, you
can see there's a little twist, I'm having to still put in, even though it's
a braid rope it's got a little bit of memory in, it needs a little bit of
tidying as we go, here we go now, when we get to this point I now need to do
exactly the same, I've got to go around the back, so we'll just go around the
back there once at this point, because it's pretty heavy I'm actually going to
pick it up and lay it down onto a deck, and then if I just prop the end up, take
my loose end, wiggle it around the back
make sure it's low enough, so we get across,
crossover, that then locks it in, we'll do one more for luck, and now I can just pop
that through, and depending which ending I want, I think we'll just do over the
top, pull nice and tight, and there we are, safe and sound, that's ready for a locker.