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.
