You don't just buy a roll of rope and use it for everything.'ĭouble-braid polyester, which has a braided core of polyester as well as the polyester braided cover, is suitable for spinnaker halyards, topping lifts and headsail sheets on medium performance smaller boats where stretch is not a consideration. Hil Bate, of Riggtech, based at Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club, Pittwater, says: 'The biggest thing about rope these days is all the products are so fantastic, you can tailor a line, sheet, brace or halyard to a specific job. With a runner tail, we don?t want it to grip to the winch we want to ease it without jerking the rig so we use PBO/Vectran.' 'With a jib sheet, we want a little bit of grip on the winch but we still want it to run smoothly. ?For some applications, we are trying to get some grip on the winch, in others we are trying to make it slippery like a spinnaker sheet where we want it to ease quite quickly,? says Bruce Clark, of Sydney Rigging. Kevlar, PBO, Technora, Cordura and Nomex are used in varying combinations and plait configurations for improved heat and abrasion resistance to suit particular applications and yacht sizes. The loads on sheets, braces and runner tails on the bigger boats are so high that when they are being surged off a winch drum they generate enough heat to melt standard polyester covers. This was accelerated by the campaigning towards the 2007 America?s Cup, which hopefully is not going to be the last. The most dramatic recent improvements, however, have been in developing specialist covers over the cores of these widely accepted synthetic materials to suit varying applications on a yacht.
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