I'm coming in late on this but some might be interested in NSW tow ropes, especially after Ralph Diaz's comments on over-engineering. We have a club standard of fifteen metres - makes double tows easy. We make them using small stainless steel carabiners from marine shops and fifteen metres of venetian blind cord of a few mm diameter from a hardwre store. None have broken yet that I know of , and this stuff has lots of stretch for give. We sew up bags (of various designs) out of rip stop nylon or shade cloth and attach them to deck fittings or towing points, often using a loop of spectra which goes around the deck fitting. They are made so the line just reels out once towing. the whole thing is small (mine is maybe 10 x 15 cm) and sits almost flat on the deck. prior to this I used bulky water ski rope with shock cord threaded into it and with floats etc that I made. But these small ones seems to work fine. BTW I saw a nice attachment point on a victorian paddlers boat the other day. He'd got some webbing - maybe climbers tape - and had attached a strip of it to his deck with 2 or three SS screws. I didn't see but he may have had grommets in the webbing - I imagine you'd need something. The tape was doubled over and had a 'd' ring in the end for attaching the tow rope. nick > *************************************************************************** *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Sat Dec 11 1999 - 16:22:46 PST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:17 PDT