How to Choose Dock Lines
How thick? Your boat length will determine how thick a rope you need.
- Boats up to 25’ require ⅜” diameter rope.
- Boats up to 35’ require ½” diameter rope.
Note: You don’t want to go thicker than you need. A thicker line is harder to handle, more difficult to coil, and takes up more space in the locker. Also, as you go thicker, you lose some of the stretch -- the longer and thinner the line, the greater the stretch.
Make sure that your line will fit comfortably on your cleats.
- 6” cleats (from tip to tip) can hold ⅜” diameter rope.
- 8” cleats (from tip to tip) can hold 1⁄2” diameter rope.
Note: If your line has an unnecessarily large diameter and you want to tie two lines to one cleat, you might not be able to tie a proper cleat hitch because one line already takes up too much of that cleat. In extreme cases, larger lines can actually unwind themselves on smaller cleats.