How Long Should Your Docklines Be?

This is a loaded question with three answers to it.

First answer: for permanent docklines in your home slip, the lines should be the length from boat cleat to dock cleat and a little more to tie it off or an eye splice at either end to the exact length needed to keep the boat in the perfect position.
As you can tell, there is no set rule with this one about lengths since these are purpose made lines with one single application.

Bow and Stern: length from boat cleat to dock cleat

Spring: length from boat cleat to dock cleat

Second answer: for the day sailor or weekend cruiser, the lines should be made relative to the boat length. The bow and stern lines should be 2/3rds the boat length and the spring lines should be 1x the boat length. These lines will be used for tying up to new piers or to other boats when you are rafted up. The bow and stern lines will have a short run to their cleat and therefore don’t need a lot of extra line. The spring lines will run a longer distance for and aft so they will need to be a full boat length.

Bow and Stern: 2/3x boat length

Spring: 1x boat length

Third answer: for the serious cruiser, short docklines will not suffice. Day sailors and weekend cruisers have the opportunity to choose what weather they go out in, so they can choose to only sail on the good days! As a full time cruiser, you will be forced to sail in all the weathers: good days and awful nights! Your docklines will need to be up for the challenge.
The bow and stern lines need to be 1.5x the boat length and the spring lines need to be at least the boat length.
Why such long bow and stern lines? Imagine a horrible situation where you enter a port in the dark in a storm and manage to get the bow up to a pier where you can toss a line to shore and be held to a fixed point. You were smart and came up on the lee side of the pier but now the boat is being blown off from the pier and there is no way you can get the stern up to the pier under motor. How do you tie up in this situation? Easy! Having a really long stern line will allow you to walk the stern line up to the bow and toss it to shore. Now all you need to do is pull the stern in from land where you can get the proper leverage and angle to do so safely.
This may sound rather far fetched but we did just this one night in the Mediterranean where we were being pounded by 50 knot winds and short, close together seas. After being hammered for a day and a half, we sailed into a marina and tied up in 40 knots of wind. It was a horrible experience, but we made it through safely because we had a long enough line.
The bow and stern lines need to be long enough that you can toss it from the other position. Being able to toss the bow line from the stern or the stern line from the bow will make all the difference when those rare situations rise from the deep.
Once you are in the slip, you can then tie up the spring lines which should be at least the boats length (but longer is useful). Long lines are also needed if you sail into places with extreme tides. Tides greater than 10 feet are common on the Atlantic coast of Europe and the USA, and when you tie up to a quay and the tide goes out, you will need to constantly adjust your lines (if you tied to a close cleat). This is laborious and time consuming, so it won’t work out! You need to tie to a cleat that’s far away from the boat so that when the tide changes the line just changes angle slightly and won’t need any adjustments. Reaching a far away clear also means that you will need a long line to reach it!

An additional line that will be very handy is a Breast Line. This is a short line that runs straight out from the boat to the pier and is used to keep the boat close to the pier for easy boarding. This line is too short to setup to a fixed pier for a long time as tides will be a bother, but it can be left permanently attached to a floating pier (as the tide will not change the length from the boat cleat to pier cleat).

Bow and Stern: 1.5x boat length

Spring: 1x boat length (or longer)

Breast: 1/2 boat length (minimum 10 feet)

While many lines are convenient to have when tying up, you also need to store them when underway. Lots of thick heavy lines will get in the way when they fill up all your lazarette space! The ideal is to have 2 bow lines, 2 stern lines, 4 spring lines, and breast line.
When we are going to be in a place for a long time, especially if you are going to leave the boat unattended for a long time, it would behoove you to double up the lines. Thankfully, any marina you are leaving the boat in will probably have a chandler nearby which means you can buy some additional lines! When you finally leave the port, you can decide to bring them all with you or retire your older lines and keep the new ones.

Securing Continuous Furler Pin

The clevis pin on this continuous furler used for a Code 0 sail kept having problems. To reduce snagging, a cotter ring was used to retain the clevis pin. The cotter ring fouled on the furled Genoa and pulled itself straight! Thankfully the pin fell out after the sail was furled and lowered onto the deck. While being put into its locker, the clevis pin fell out and everything landed inside the locker disconnected, but nothing fell overboard!

To prevent this from recurring, we needed to use a different form or retaining pin. Cotter ring failed and a cotter pin would snag on too many things, so our only option left was to stitch together a retaining pin.

Using the available holes, I stitched stainless steel seizing wire through the clevis pin and back through the swivel.

On the other side, I simply sent the wire back to the primary side, until it was all ready to tie off. Once plenty of wraps had occurred, I twisted the wires together and fed them back into the swivel where they remain protected from any snags and safely tucked away.

Most importantly, the wires never tough the top of the torsion rope as the eye splice passes over the clevis pin in the swivel. The clevis pin is fully retained and no chafe occurs internationally. This retaining setup will hold everything in place while preventing any snags on sails or gear up at the masthead.

Furling Vs. Hanks

Sails that are hanked onto the stay are a traditional system that has worked for centuries. The problem with it is the sail never really “goes away”. It’s up or down, nothing in between and when it’s down, it’s all piled up on the deck or boom.
Roller furling is the modern alternative where the sail wraps up around a tube that is positioned either over the stay or inside the spar. The sail can be furled or unfurled part way giving you unlimited variability in the sail size. When you want to put the sail away, it just wraps up and disappears. When you want the sail out, you just release it and never need to hoist the sail up against the force of gravity.
This all sounds very convenient, but what about when something goes wrong? With hank on sails, the sail goes up and down the spar or stay. If the halyard breaks, the sail will fall because of gravity. If the hanks get stuck, they will not slide and the sail will not want to move. Hanks on a stay are almost impossible to get stuck and if they do is because they have lost their shape and need to be replaced. They can be yanked hard to get them to break free and come down, but bronze on steel make for a slippery combination that almost never gets stuck. Hanks on a spar can get stuck, as the sail slides can resist movement on the mast track or get fouled up in the fasteners attaching the mast track to the spar. Different systems exist with differing prices and differing levels of headaches. The cheapest is an external metal mast track where metal slides hook on and secure the sail to the spar. This setup is inexpensive and very secure, but requires maintenance to keep it all moving smoothly. The sail will always go up but might struggle to come down if there is enough wind pressure on the sail. We use this setup on our boat for the storm trysail and it has proven itself reliable.
A more expensive option is a plastic track by Tides Marine where the sail slides are bronze or stainless steel. The setup is very slippery and the sail will always move up and down with ease. In storm force winds (over 45 knots in our experience) we were able to lower the mainsail just by pulling on the downhaul even though the boat was heeled over pretty far and the wind was technically “blowing the sail up” as the wind was blasting it from foot to head!
Some spars come with internal mast tracks where plastic slides fit into the key way on the aft edge of the spar. These work, and are the cheapest of all setups (because it comes with the mast) but it is also notorious for getting stuck on the way up and down. Many people who have this setup will switch to an external track to make life easier and sailing more enjoyable.
Furling systems offer the ease of working everything from the comfort of the cockpit as all the control lines are led aft. This means you can easily steer and work the sails without getting up!
While it might sound convenient, you must also think about “what if” scenarios. More parts means more failure points. It’s not just a halyard and some hanks keeping your sail up and set, you have an entire machine to worry about!

While on a passage with a friend, the mizzen sail got stuck upon deployment. The sail started to come out but then stopped! The skipper had to go on deck and yank the sail out of the slot in the spar where the sail was pinched. The sail was new, so it wasn’t a shape issue, instead it was as simple as the sail not being fueled up tight enough the last time it was put away so the furled sail was pinching on the walls of the spar until it got stuck. The sail would not come out but worse yet, would not go back in! In a storm when you need to reduce sail, having a sail stuck part way is a horrible fate!
On that same sail, the Code 0 sail on its continuous furler gave some serious troubles. The sail simply did not want to fuel in as the winds started to build. Wrestling a Code 0 in winds over 20 knots is an impossible task for 3 able crew as we struggled for some time to get it to yield to our commands!

What happened was the sail had so much pressure that it pressed against the furled Genoa. When we finally got it to start to furl, the Code 0 sucked the Genoa sheets in with it, so we needed to unfurl it and free the sheets; but the wind was stronger and everything was stuck! We eased the halyard to get the luff to pull away from the Genoa, which worked but then the furling line kept falling off of the continuous furler. With the luff tight, it pressed too hard on the Genoa, luff loose it could not furl either. The winds continued to build so we deployed the mainsail and set upon a broad reach to try and blanket the Code 0 to reduce the pressure on it, but this had us sailing straight for a lee shore at 8-9 knots! The Code 0 was so big and effective that the dirty wind from the mainsail was still too much pressure for the furler to operate, so we decided to take it down open like an old time sail. This was a huge mistake!
As we eased the halyard and sheet to bring it onto the deck, the sail became even more powerful as the luff billowed and the sail filled. The power in the sail was tremendous as we rocketed towards shore even faster. We couldn’t turn into the wind because the sail could foul on the rig and make matters even worse so we continued to try with no avail.
The sail began to flog and yank on the yacht as it pulled us towards our destiny with terrible fright! We decided to try again the original way and got the Genoa sheets clear, tightened the halyard, and installed the furling line. This time, the sail furled in with reluctance and we were able to veer off from our course towards land.
It was a frightful experience that thankfully caused no loss to the sail, yacht, or crew. The skipper claimed that if he were alone, he would have needed to release the sail into the sea because it would have been impossible to recover alone on the boat. The Code 0 is of similar shape to our Drifter, but our Drifter is hanked onto a stay, so releasing the halyard brings the sail down without allowing the luff to billow out. The further it comes down, the less power it has. On the Code 0, this proved the opposite, as it came down, it increased in power! Free flying sails are a lot to handle (ask anyone with a spinnaker which sail is easier to bring down: spinnaker or jib) and adding a furler means that when anything fails, the sail becomes a powerful free flying sail!
Sadly, this was not an isolated experience, for the next day in very light wind, we set the Code 0 again, and took it down long before the winds built up like last time. As it furled, the torsion rope got stuck and stopped furling as the electric winch continued to pull on the furling line. When we eased the furling line to fix the furler, the torsion rope spun straight and wrapped both furling lines tightly around it and completely obscuring the furler. Now we had no access to work on the furler! We managed to reach the winch with the continuous loop and put the whole thing on the winch to force the furling line off the torsion rope, then under tension, fix the furler, then continue furling it back in. What if the winds built faster than we could work? What if a squall came up? What if the skipper was alone and didn’t have us or anyone else to help?

While furlers are very convenient, the problems they can bring far outweigh the inconvenience of raising a sail in my opinion.

Dog-bone Dyneema Soft Shackle

Want to replace your steel standing rigging with synthetic standing rigging? Easy!

Simply swap out your steel stays for Dyneema stays.

Now all you have to do is swap out all of your bronze hanks that will chafe on the synthetic stay with soft hanks. These with dog bones are very secure and incredibly easy to operate!

Being on a sailboat at sea

Sit back and relax as we take a peaceful sail through the ocean.