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Old 12-06-2006
btrayfors btrayfors is offline
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btrayfors will become famous soon enough btrayfors will become famous soon enough
Thought I'd seen some wild stuff, but this is the most cockamamie idea I've seen in a long time. The idea that you want to tie up a yacht as tight as possible and with as low stretch material as possible is just plain nuts.

While I'm sure someone will come forward to "prove" this theory mathematically, anyone who's been around boats in a marina for awhile knows it's just plain nonsense.

In fact, when you tie up a boat in a slip in such way as to leave the lines a bit loose, you put much less stress on the boat's cleats and on the dock's cleats. Any boat in a slip will move about, due to the wind, current, and wave action. Sometimes, there's quite a bit of movement, particularly up-and-down movement. Loose lines, and stretchy ones, allow the boat to move up-and-down with very little tension on the lines.

If the same boat were tied tight to the dock with non-stretch steel lines, there would be tremendous pull on the cleats, and a passing boat might just cause enough wave action to do some real damage.

Bill
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