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You can't reverse the winches. It's just a difference in the design of winch. If you look at lewmar's website they have instructions that show the construction of lots of different winches.

Most smaller 2sp winches, like lewmar 16 to 40, are direct drive in the 1st gear. The handle turns the spindle and spindle directly turns the drum. There are no gears, just the pawls in the drum locking to the notches in the spindle. So handle needs to turn clockwise in 1st so that the drum also turns clockwise. In 2nd there one gear between the spindle and the drum, so there is a reversal of direction.

In larger winches they need a better ratio than 1:1 in 1st gear so there are more gears in the winch, so that 1st also uses some gears. It could be done so that 1st goes through one reversal and 2nd goes though two. It's usually the other way around but doesn't have to be.