E25+ New Lifelines

We’re trying to make Luffalee safe, easy and fun to sail,and comfortable in that order, so an obvious choice was to replace the lifelines. The ones that came on the boat were probably the original ones and they showed it. They were sagging and didn’t have anything left in the turnbuckles to pick up the slack. The gate on the starboard side wouldn’t open and there were multiple locations where rust was visible under the vinyl coating. With the discovery of CS Johnson splice line terminals and the ease of splicing Amsteel, the choice to go with Dyneema lifelines was an easy one.

Each side consisted of the Amsteel, a toggle eye, gate eye,pelican hook, and a simple thimble. Tensioning came from the threaded stud of the pelican hook for the gate and lashing between the thimble and bow pulpit for the rest of the system. I used simple buried splices to keep it clean and simple. The only hang up was when I decided to use 1/4 Amsteel instead of 3/16, but forgot to increase the burry length, so technically I don’t have enough burry according to Sampson’s splicing guidelines.
However, these aren’t under a huge load, they don’t see a cyclical load, and I locked each splice with whipping twine, so I don’t think it will be a problem.

I’m really happy with how the project turned out. They look great, are soft to the touch andreally easy to operate with the new pelican hooks. I just need to add some lanyards to thepelican hooks to make them even easier to operate. So far, I think this is one of the bestupgrades yet!