Rigging Chafe Protection

Rigging Chafe Protection encompasses a group of products that are designed to prevent wear points and abrasion on your sails and ropes resulting from contact with your standing rigging.

Anti-chafe measures are an essential part of a yacht owner/skipper's defence against the rigours of offshore and ocean sailing. Regular Skipper's Checks should ensure that nothing has been compromised by continuous abrasive movement. In this context, Standing Rigging includes:

• The mast, spreaders and anything attached to the mast, large or small
• Wire rigging and wire terminals expecially turnbuckles and bottle screws
• Guardwires and lifelines

Chafe Protection, especially on extended passage, is a very important factor in the successful completion of a safe voyage.

N.B. Chafe Protection products are reactive in the sense that they make the contact less abrasive with less chance of troublesome, possibly dangerous snagging.

Proactive measures e.g. re-routing lines and changing sail configuration/setup should be considered before setting sail, in order to avoid potential wear points if at all possible.

Special attention should be paid to split (cotter) pins and split (clevis) rings - they may be small but the consequences of failure may be anything but minor.

Sealing pins and rings with tape or covering them with leather or PVC protects the sails and rigging from abrasion but importantly, it also prevents any snagging.

Snagging can lead to pins or rings being torn from their location making the rig susceptible to failure as well as potentially causing rips in your ropes and sails.

Jimmy Green Marine offer proactive solutions to anti-chafe protection that broadly subdivide into:

• Tape - to ensure that pins and rings remain secure and to prevent them snagging - for slippery spreader ends
• Tape, Leather and PVC - to promote as frictionless a contact as possible where touching is unavoidable
• Nylon Rollers - to lessen wear by allowing the contact points to move together