Left Handedness

Elizabeth City, NC
No LL

We'll stay here in EC a couple of more days waiting for a package. Next Sat/Sun could be a window to make a passage from Norfolk to New York.

My daughter Jenny commented on my over and under post. She remembers Libby complaining about the damn left handed skipper making everything harder. I had forgotten about that.

Here's the point. Everything having to do with the lines on a sailboat needs to be standardized. Lines always wrap around a winch clockwise; regardless of which winch from which manufacturer. Once you learn that, you never need to stop and wonder which way again.

Ditto with lines on cleats, and coiling of lines, the conventions need to be standardized. For each cleat on my boat I have a convention such as wrap-wrap-cross-cross and under. See the picture. For my anchor snubber I add an additional wrap to make it extra strong.

The purpose of standardization is so that anyone on the boat knows how to tie the line securely, and so that it can be untied in the dark without guessing as to how the previous person tied it.

Now for the controversial part; coiling the lines for storage. This too needs to be standardized for all the same reasons plus. The plus reason is that if you drop a coil of halyard on deck, then try to recoil it in the opposite direction, it twists and knots and makes a hell of a mess.

But should the standard direction of coiling be clockwise or counterclockwise? Further, which way would clockwise mean when you can look at a coil from either side? The only possible answer is, "The way the captain says." That is the standard answer on every boat and ship going all the way back to the Phoneticians I bet.

It just so happens that I'm left-handed while Libby and most of my guests are right-handed. The way I instinctively coil is the opposite to their instinct. When I find that they coiled it the opposite way I get cranky. When they try to recoil a line the opposite way that I did it, they get cranky.

Sorry Jenny, this is one of those rare cases where the only way to define right and wrong is, "Do it like the captain says." No arguments, no suggestions, no pleas, no resistance. In most other things, I'm a softy. I'll listen to reason and perhaps can be persuaded to change. Not in this case.