Name Brand vs Econo Brand

When you look at the prices for ropes, you may be shocked at how much some brands want for their line. Why pay several dollars per foot when you can buy the same size line from another brand for pennies?

There is actually a difference! I'm in the process of making rope fenders and I need a lot of line that will wrap the whole fender up in a nice package. This line will be under no tension and is purely decorative. I was paying $1.25 per foot for 1/2" Three Strand from New England Ropes and thought this was going to be too expensive to wrap the fenders. I decided to go with an Econo Brand of line where each foot only cost me $0.50 per foot. When you are talking 600 foot spools, that's a difference of $450 per spool!

The differences are greatly apparent! The more costly New England Ropes has tighter wrapped yarns, stronger lays, and resists unraveling. The Econo Brand has much larger yarns which are hardly wrapped and will unlay if the ends are not taped tightly. 

The tighter yarns also translate into better chafe resistance which directly affects the longevity of a line on board your yacht. The simple act of tying many half hitches has led the Econo Brand rope to pull apart. The line is riddled with little blebs where the yarns are pulling out of the lays from tying so many knots. If this were a working line on the boat, those blebs would be quickly chafed open, leading to premature chafe failure. 

Imagine your docklines, chafing on the chocks as the boat bobs around the slip, or the anchor rode dragging on the bottom of the sea floor. These actions would wreak havoc on a cheap rope, causing yarns to pull out and break. In these working situations, the consequences are much greater. Your boat could break free of the pier and begin to drift, causing damage to your vessel and those around it. If the anchor rode were to chafe through and snap, you will begin to drift through the water with the added cost of buying a new anchor!

If you are buying rope for your boat, don't let price dictate your decision. Do buy quality ropes that will protect your vessel as they provide a long and reliable service life!

Halyard Safety

In the event of a Man Over Board emergency, you will want to have as many tools to aid in recovery of the crew member as possible. Once the person is alongside the vessel, it can be a distinct challenge to pull the person back on deck. This is where the halyard comes into play.

You want to have at least one halyard that is long enough to reach the water to allow for crew retrieval. On board Wisdom, all the halyards are long enough to reach into the water alongside of the boat. 

The reason I have all the halyards able to reach the water is simple: What if you are using the retrieval halyard when someone falls over? Freeing the halyard simply adds one more step to the retrieval process. For this reason, all my halyards are long enough to reach the water so that any free halyard will work during the emergency situation.

When purchasing new halyards, be sure to add enough length for them to reach the water.

Lines Left at Mast

The alternative to leading lines aft to the cockpit is to leave the lines at the mast. This means that you need to go up to the mast to raise or lower the sails, set or shake a reef, tension the Cunningham, or adjust the topping lift.

Once again, we should look at the pros and cons of lines left at the mast

The pros:

You can see what you are doing while working on the sails
Fewer turns in the lines
If something jams, you are there to fix it and can see what happened
There is less spaghetti in the cockpit
It keeps the halyards and downhauls separated from the sheets
Dedicated winches
You can buy shorter lines

The cons:

You have to go forward to the mast
You need more winches

While going forward to the mast is inconvenient, it isn't the end of the world. When I sail alone, I lock the wheel and then go forward; when sailing with Maddie, she stays at the helm while I go forward. 

Once you are up there, you can see exactly what you are doing on the sails while raising, lowering, or reefing.You are there, looking right up your mast to see how everything is going. If a batten gets hooked on the rigging, or a line gets kinked and jammed, you are there and able to fix the problem.

The lines left at the mast also means that you will have a winch for each halyard. This does equate to more cost, but you can control the luff tension of each sail at any time. The advantage of having the halyards stay at the mast is that the halyards stay at the mast and do not join all the other lines and sheets that are dumped in the cockpit. This helps to keep the number of lines that have to terminate in the cockpit down.

The final advantages of leaving the lines at the mast is the reduced resistance and the need to buy shorter lines. The halyards come down straight with no bends or turns as it reaches the winch. Since the journey to the winch is shorter, you don't need to buy the extra feet of line to reach the cockpit. This makes it cheaper to replace the running rigging when the time comes.

Lines led aft and lines kept at the mast all have their ideal situations. Lines led aft shines on coastal cruisers that will be used in protected waters and on short trips. Lines left at the mast are found on bluewater cruisers because it has fewer places for failure to show up. 

Do you prefer your lines led aft or left at the mast?

Lines Led Aft

There is a trend these days to lead all lines aft to the cockpit. I think we should look at the pros and cons of leading lines to the cockpit vs keeping them at the mast.

The Pros are:

You never need to leave the cockpit
You need less winches

Never needing to leave the cockpit is nice! I sailed on a ketch with roller main and mizzen, and was so excited to tell Maddie that I was able to reef all the sails without stepping foot out of the cockpit and it was completed really fast! 

The other advantage is there are less winches needed to manage the vessel. On board Wisdom, we have 6 winches in the cockpit, 3 winches at the mast, and 1 winch on the boom. That's 10 winches to work all the lines involved in running the boat! If I needed to replace them, it would certainly be an expensive endeavor!

On sailboats with the lines led aft, they can run on much fewer winches. In theory, all the halyards and mainsheet could be managed by a single winch! This is because they work on a bank of clutches that lead to a single winch. Clutches are much less expensive as compared to a two speed self tailing winch! Clutches hold the lines in place, allowing you to take it off the winch to then put another line on the winch. This frees up the winch, allowing it to work all the lines led to it one at a time!

I have a friend who is up in years and still able to cruise singlehanded because his winch on the cockpit combing is electric. For the cost of one electric winch, he can easily manage his entire vessel! He doesn't have to climb up on deck in the dark during a storm to bring the sails in. Instead he stands behind the dodger and pushes a button to trim, set, or reduce his sails.

The Cons are:

Cockpit spaghetti
Increased line resistance
More deck hardware and turning blocks
Additional length of all lines
Upward stress on deck
Trouble shooting jams

 A creative way to organize the cockpit spaghetti

When all the lines are led into the cockpit, all the tail ends of the lines end up in the cockpit. This can lead to what is known as Spaghetti. On a very simple sloop rig, you would have:

Main Halyard
Jib Halyard
Vang
Spinnaker Halyard
Mainsheet
Outhaul
Cunningham
Jib Furling Line
Reefing Tack Line
Reefing Clew Line

Imagine all of these lines led to a single winch through a massive clutch bank, then dumping into the cockpit! This is why they sell organization bags along with many other systems to try and tame the mess that forms in the cockpit. If you do not manage these lines well, knots and kinks can form which would then impair the operation of all of these lines! My older friend who cruises is very methodical and keeps his lines in pristine organization! He never lets a mess develop so he never has to worry about a mess impairing his ability to control his vessel. If you are not organized like that, this could quickly become a problem!

Increased resistance is another problem with leading the lines aft. Each turn the line makes adds resistance to the system. When you think about the turns involved to run a halyard, or worse, an outhaul; resistance quickly escalates! A line that could be easily manhandled now needs a winch due to all the turn induced resistance!

In addition to the resistance, you need to have all of the hardware to cause these turns. All of these turning blocks and shivs need to be maintained, which adds to the work involved in keeping a cruising boat operational. There is already enough work and cost involved in keeping a sailboat in working order, why add more to the equation?

In order to reach the cockpit, each and every line needs the distance from the area of work to the cockpit added to it. When the lines cost several dollars per foot, adding several yards of rope to each line can become a very expensive addition. This makes the cost of replacing the running rigging significantly higher. In our example of 10 lines led aft, if the distance from the cockpit to the mast were 10 feet and the lines cost $1 per foot, that would be an additional $100 added to the cost of the running rigging.

All of these lines pull upwards at their turning blocks near the mast. Deck stepped boats have the force of the mast pushing down to help counteract this upward pull, but keel stepped boats do not. Properly engineered keel stepped boats will have a turnbuckle mounted inside the cabin attaching the deck to the mast. This fitting will help transfer some of the upward pull on the deck to the mast. If this fitting were to part, the deck would be ripped up by the force of the turning blocks. If you do have one of these fittings, be sure to inspect it regularly.

The last issue with leading lines aft is in the case of trouble shooting. If a line gets stuck, there are many potential offenders that could have caused the problem. The line could be stuck in the clutch, or stuck in any of the many turning blocks on the deck, as well as the normal locations for a jam located on the mast. When trying to trouble shoot, you need someone in the cockpit at the winch to pull or slack the line and another person up at the mast to figure out what went wrong. 

Some boat manufactures don't like the look of all the lines running aft on the deck and have encased the lines in a fiberglass tunnel. While this clears the decks for lounging, it makes them much harder to inspect and maintain the lines. If a jam occurs inside the tunnel, an extra level of complexity just got added to the problem.

I personally feel that lines led to the cockpit are wonderful on coastal cruisers with in-mast furling and make sailing much easier as all the lines are within close reach. They work great for coastal sailors who will be doing day trips and maybe a weekend sail. For longer voyages, I feel that it presents more instances for failures to occur and makes fixing the gear failures more complex. With all the winches I have in my cockpit, I have sometimes wanted an extra winch to pull on the random line that needs to be pulled. Imagine having a situation like this with a very limited number of winches. 

How do you feel about the modern trend of all the lines being led to the cockpit?

Calculating Halyard Loads

Last time, we talked about calculating Sheet Loads. Now we will look at the loads placed on the Halyards and why they are so difficult to calculate! If you look online, it won't be easy to find a resource on calculating halyard loads because of the legal ramifications. If a halyard breaks because it wasn't strong enough when it was calculated to be strong enough, legal consequences can follow. Because of this, everyone seems to keep a tight lip with regards to halyard loads.

In a similar fashion, I will begin with a disclaimer:
The loads calculated here are calculated with formulas that are discussed in college physics and math classes. They are the formulas for calculating the tension on a line. They are theoretical values, not real world values. In the real world, shocks and freak weather systems can greatly stress a system in ways far more extensive than originally calculated. In other words, always oversize by a significant margin of safety. To be on the safest side, I would follow the recommended size given by New England Ropes in their calculator, and then choose a line with at least that breaking strength. 

http://www.neropes.com/InteractiveLineSelector/Sailing_Type.html

If you still want to know other ways of estimating the loads placed on the halyards for academic reasons, read on!

The halyard pulls against the head to keep the luff under tension. While there are many formulas and online calculators available to figure out the clew loads, halyard calculators are not as plentiful.

This is because halyard tension can be extremely variable. If you simply raise your sail all the way and let it hang without applying any tension, the halyard load will be equivalent to the weight of the sail hanging from it.

Then you begin to tighten the halyard by cranking a winch or tightening the Cunningham. These actions along with the force of the wind pressure on the sail add up to an immense load on the halyard. 

The most reliable way to calculate the halyard tension would be to sail with a tension meter mounted between the halyard and winch. This would be the only way to know exactly how much force is being exerted on that line.

Installing a tension meter inline is not practical, so other methods must be utilized to estimate the loads. One of the least involved methods is to calculate halyard tension based off of the force exerted on a 10" winch handle. The winch is simply a device that acts as a force multiplier. The number on the top of the winch corresponds to the number of times your effort is multiplied (not taking friction into account). For example, a 24 winch simply multiplies the force you put in by 24. If you apply 1 pound of force, it will apply 24 pounds of force to the halyard; if you apply 20 pounds of force, it will apply 480 pounds of force. By estimating the amount of force you are applying to the handle, you can get a ballpark figure of the halyard tension.

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The safest way to decide what size halyard to use is to follow the advice given by New England Ropes on their interactive line selector. 

http://www.neropes.com/InteractiveLineSelector/Sailing_Type.html

The line selector will tell you a specific line for the job, you can then look at the breaking strength of the line and use that as your minimum breaking strength requirement. Say it gives a size for Sta-Set X, you want to use a smaller or lighter line. Simply take the minimum breaking strength for the size of line they list and select an equally strong alternative. 

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(If you get bored with the math, skip down to the next divider line, the article resumes there)

Lastly, if you really want to do the math to calculate the loads exerted on the halyard because you are curious, please read on. I did well in Physics, so I believe I have correctly calculated all the values. I personally use the line selector from New England Ropes or the factory recommendations as my starting point. I have no problem installing a "stronger than necessary" halyard on a boat, but do veer away from the thought of installing a line with less breaking strength.

For our example, we will use a 500 square foot mainsail. The measurements of this sail are as follows:

Luff height 50 feet
Foot length 20 feet
Leech Length 53.85 feet

Tack angle 90*
Head angle 21.8*
Clew angle 68.2*

If this is starting to look like Trigonometry class, it's because it is Trig. 

From here, we can calculate the wind pressure that will be exerted on the sail, which in our example would be

Wind Pressure per SqFt = 0.00256 x Wind Speed^2 in mph

0.00256 x 25^2 = 1.6 lbs per SqFt
1.6 x 500 square feet = 800 pounds in 25mph of wind.

So in winds of 25mph, we can estimate that 800 pounds of pressure will be exerted on the mainsail.

To convert our wind pressure into halyard load, we need to calculate the forces involved using a vector diagram.

The force on the clew is:

0.00431 x 25^2 x 500 = 1,346.875 pounds on the clew

The force on the head is roughly the sum of the wind pressure on the sail pulling the sail down, and the load on the clew of the sail pulling back and down. In our example, with 800 pounds of wind pressure on the sail and 1347 pounds of clew load, we arrive at around 2147 lbs of load on the head. 

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Big picture points to take away when sizing your halyard:

• Online calculators exist that will tell you roughly what size line you need. I strongly recommend using them and following their guidance.

http://www.neropes.com/InteractiveLineSelector/Sailing_Type.html

• If you wan't to know a rough estimate of the loads involved, look at the force multiplier number on your winch and guestimate how many pounds you are pushing on a 10" handle. Multiply your guestimated work with the number on the winch and that is a very rough estimate of luff tension while the sail is being raised.
• You can do all the math involved to figure out a rough estimate for the halyard load. This information is only useful for those who would sit at the helm and wonder "how much tension is the halyard under?" I would not choose a halyard that has a breaking strength anywhere near the calculated load. The safety margin on the halyard should be tremendous. If this line should snap, the sail comes down and it will be a lot of work to replace this line (this is the same reason you should replace your halyard when it begins to show signs of wear).
• Make sure the halyard is comfortable in your hands. 
• There is a nifty graph that will tell you the halyard loads based on boat size on page 372 of "The Complete Riggers Apprentice" by Brion Toss. It is the only place I have ever seen any information on how much load is on a halyard. To give an idea of how elusive this information is, the graph is only a small portion of the page with no caption or explanation in the back of the book, past where most people would have stopped reading. I do not have permission to reproduce the image, so the best I can do is reference the specific page in the book.