You approach the dock, fighting wind and current, and give your longest dock line a mighty heave. The line sails out, snarls, falls short of the pier and the boat starts to drift. The gaffe can bruise your standing among fellow mariners, but also can damage your vessel. Coil or flake a line properly, however, and both you and your boat look good.

BASIC COILING

GENE BJERKECoiling is quick and easy, and with a little practice you can coil a line neatly almost as fast as you can gather it into a jumbled mess.

The rope you will likely encounter will be three-strand twisted (called laid line) or braided. Probably all the laid line you will encounter will be "right-hand lay" (there is such a thing as left-hand lay, but I have never seen it). Right-hand laid line should always be coiled clockwise, if coiled the other way it will kink and snarl.

Taking the end in your left hand, slide your right hand a distance down the rope, depending on how large you want to make your coil. Grasp the rope between your right thumb and index finger and put a slight right-hand (or clockwise) twist in the line as you bring it to your left hand. Grasp the loop you have made in your left hand and repeat the process. Each successive loop lays on top of the previous one.

That is the basic method for coiling rope. If the rope is too long for you to easily hold the whole coil in your hand, you can find something like a belaying pin to coil it over. Alternately, you can coil it on the deck by simply feeding it in a clockwise circle, each subsequent loop lying on top of the previous one. It doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it is neat. If the coil is maintained, line should feed from it neatly without snarling.

Just make sure you don't try to feed it through the middle of the coil. That will snarl.

BRAIDED LINE

Braided line is less fussy about which direction it is coiled. Some people will wind it in both directions in the same coil. That is, one loop will be twisted to the right, the next one to the left. The right-hand loops will be overhand and the left-hand ones will be underhand, ensuring that the rope will not take a twist as it is pulled off the coil. This is also how stiffer materials, like electric cords, should be coiled.

Once the line is coiled, it needs to be stowed. One of the simplest ways is to take the last loop, wrap it completely around the coil, then push it through the middle and out the top. This will give you a small eye that you can use to hang the coil on a hook.

In some cases, such as a halyard belayed to a cleat on the mast, start your coil about a foot away from the cleat. When the coil is finished, reach through the middle of the coil and grasp that extra foot of line. Pull it through the coil, put a twist in it, and hang it on the cleat.

BASIC FLAKING

For a long line that will need to run out quickly, the best method is to flake the line, if you have available deck space. Flaking is simply laying the line out in a series of overlapping Figure-8's. Because the rope is turned in opposite directions at each end of the Figure-8, it will not develop a twist as it runs out.

GENE BJERKE

You can make large Figure-8's piled on top of each other, or you can lay the line out in long zigzags back and forth. To save space you can push the line together, meaning part of the turns at each end will lie on top of the line. You need to think ahead how the line will feed off when it runs and make sure that part of the turn is on top.

FLEMISH TOUCH

If a line is very long and absolutely must run out without snagging or snarling, try a Flemish.

GENE BJERKEThis method is often used as a decorative way to store line–a flat, tight coil down on the deck that looks like an architectural ceiling medallion–but it is also very functional. The old whalers Flemished down their harpoon lines in a tub. They would make a flat coil in the bottom of the tub. When they got to the end they would simple add another atop the first until the entire line was used up, filling the tub. I have seen halyards on very large gaff sails Flemished down several layers deep on the deck (without the tub). These were lines that absolutely had to run clear or there would be a serious problem.

Most of us will never need to handle that much line. But it doesn't take a hundred-foot piece of rope to cause a problem. With proper coiling or flaking, you can be sure that whatever long lines you have will run smoothly, without bruising your boat or your pride.