Going loopy – making a continuous splice

Roger Hughes declutters the cockpit by splicing his furling lines end-to-end into a continuous loop

- Roger Hughes

Rope is used to rotate nearly all furling drums and some – such as Code 0 sail furlers and the old Hood in-mast system – employ a continuous line.

On my brigantine schooner Britannia, the French-made Facnor furling drivers on the mainsail and fore-course squaresail are operated by long ropes that pass once around the rotating drum and out the other side, then back to the cockpit.

They use a 3/8in (10mm), double-braided line to grip the driver, much like the jaws on a self-tailing winch, which in turn rotates the mandrel (foil) to wind the sails in and out.

My mainsail needs 16 rotations of the driver and the squaresail needs 19. Using a single line therefore results in a very long tail on one end or the other, whether the sails are furled or unfurled; the squaresail tail is 45ft long and the mainsail 35ft. These lines all lead back to the cockpit and, with the addition of two headsails and between-mast staysail furling lines, it can become very cluttered.

It would be a great improvement if these long lines could be made into a continuous loop, with only a few feet in the cockpit to go round the winches. Then I could just wind away, without having to coil yards of rope to keep the area tidy.

Considerations

There are different methods to make a continuous (or end-to-end) loop with double braided line, described in rope-maker manuals and web videos, but they result in a splice that is thicker than the rest of the rope, and may not pass around the jaws of drum drivers or through clutches, blocks and self-tailing winches, with serious possibilities of a rope jam. Therefore any continuous splice needs to be no thicker than the rest of the rope. Needless to say, the splice also has to be very strong.