Salty Lady has lines, lots of lines! Mooring, lines, cruising lines, anchor lines and lines on her mast and boom.

The mooring lines were old and stiff, the lines on the mast simply worn out.

We decided to downsize the existing mooring lines from 3/4″ to 5/8″. The reasoning was that it was marginal at best to get two sets of 3/4″ lines comfortably over the hawse cleats. The 5/8″ fit perfectly. Salty Lady used an entire roll of 300′ to make up new lines.

Dock lines for her slip now even have leather chafing guards. So slick looking.

Her cruising lines have one spliced loop and a plain whipped end as opposed to a backsplice. While a backsplice provides something of a stop when in hand, it’s exactly that stop which can get hung up on a dock cleat. We prefer a whipped bitter end which can slide right out.

When it came to the mast and the lines for the two sets of blocks used for lifting the boom and lifting the dinghy, Salty Lady received 7/16 braided line. With 3 different tasks we ordered line with different tracer colors. Unbeknownst to me I ordered a yacht braid and a halyard braid. What? They’re different?

I found the halyard braid impossible to splice. After a call to the vender I was educated! Halyard braid is indeed difficult to impossible to splice and it’s stiff! Not exactly what I was looking for to run through blocks. The Yacht braid on the other hand was fine. I had never spliced braided line so there was a good learning curve. The first splice took about an hour to figure out. Now give me 20 minutes and I’m done. Not near what an accomplished individual can do, but for me, I’m happy.mm