A Prop Wrapped in 300 Feet of Longline
By Tomas Iglesias, Yacht service diver, South Florida. Reviewed by Amanda McCallister, editor.
Propeller Removal & Repair | Hull & Bottom Cleaning August in Fort Lauderdale. Ninety-one-degree water and eight-foot visibility if you're lucky. I'm not complaining. It's the trade-off for a working yacht slip in the middle of the biggest boat brokering city on the East Coast. On a Tuesday morning I got a call from a 50-foot Viking that had come in from a drift off Hillsboro Inlet. The owner said he'd felt a low thrum ten miles out, then a shudder. He shut down the port engine and limped home on one screw. When I put on a mask and jumped under the swim platform, I saw why. The prop was a knot of monofilament, tarred twine, and about eight hooks. It was wrapped so tight it looked like a candy cane. It took me forty minutes of cutting and cursing to get it off, and when I finally dragged the mess into the cockpit and measured it, we had exactly three hundred feet of longline. The owner just shook his head. 'I thought I hit a fishing float,' he said. He hadn't. He'd hit the whole thing.
What 300 Feet of Line Does to a Prop
A prop spins fast. When a line gets caught on the outer edge of the blade, it wraps around the shaft with every turn. The first loop is loose, but the second tightens on the first, and by the time you feel it in the cockpit, the whole assembly is a compressed ball of braid and mono. That compression does a few things. It chafes the shaft. It overheats the stuffing box, because the line acts like an abrasive belt on the packing. And if you throttle forward to rip it free, you're asking the line to cut into the shaft seal like a cheese wire. In this case, the line had already found its way into the cutless bearing. I pulled out a length that had been forced between the bearing and the shaft, about a foot deep. The good news is that a prop can be cleared without pulling the boat out. The bad news is that the longer you run it, the more likely you're replacing a shaft or a seal, not just cutting away line.
The Removal
I'm not going to pretend I was cheap. I tried to unwrap the line in reverse by hand. That only jammed it tighter. So I went back to the dock and got my line cutter, a pick, and a pair of stainless tweezers. The trick is to work from the outside in. Cut the visible loops free first, then peel the next layer. But that shaft had been turning hot for ten miles, so the mono had melted into a hard plastic. I had to score it with a knife, then break it off in chunks. I made a half-inch cut in the shaft seal's lip, which I had to repair later. That was my mistake — I should have locked the shaft before I started cutting, not after. Once the free line was gone, I used a prop wrench to rotate the shaft slowly while a deckhand held the coupler access plate open. That helped me get the last three layers without scratching the bearing. Total time: forty minutes. My fee was fair, but the owner saved a full haul-out, and that's the real value.
Why Fort Lauderdale Specifically
The Gulf Stream runs less than ten miles off our coast. That current drags junk right down from the palm beaches. There's commercial longlining offshore — you'll see the floats if you run out before dawn — and a lot of weekend warriors drop anchor lines or drifting sets that break loose in the chop. What ends up flowing into Port Everglades and the New River is a hundred-year collection of monofilament and rope. Every local diver has pulled a pair of khakis off a prop, or a plastic chair from a marina. I once found a complete lobster trap looped around a shaft. Longline is particularly nasty because it's continuous and loaded with hooks. One hook is nothing. Eight hooks, all trying to grab your hand or your suit, changes the calculus. The lesson is local too: if you're running the outside of Fort Lauderdale's ledges after a blow, expect to find line. Check your shaft seal after any pickup. A small leak there is the first sign of a wrap you missed.
If It Happens to You
First, shut the engine off the moment you feel a vibration. Don't 'assess it' at cruise speed. That vibration is the line shredding the seal. Second, don't try to clear a prop from the cockpit with a gaff or a boat hook. You'll only push it deeper. Call a diver. Most will come to you, and if you're in a slip in Fort Lauderdale, the response time is minutes. The diver will need the engine off and the shaft lock if you have one. If the boat has no shaft lock, you'll be asked to put the transmission in neutral — not in gear. For a longer fix, some divers will ask you to turn the wheel to expose a different blade. Before you head out again, check the stuffing box. If it's dripping more than a drop every few seconds, the packing is compromised. And for God's sake, carry a line cutter on the boat. A dive knife that you can attach to your ankle is even better. You never know where that next float is going to spin into your running gear.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can't I just shift into reverse to spin the line off? That rarely works. Reverse can actually pull the line tighter around the shaft, and the sudden load can knock the alignment off or damage the transmission. I've never seen it work in a longline wrap. You need to cut, not reverse. How much does it cost to have a diver clear a prop? It depends on the diver and the complexity. I bill by the job, not by the foot of line. A simple line wrap is a quick call. But a longline with hooks and melted mono can take a few hours and specialized tools. The point is that it's a lot cheaper than a haul-out, a new shaft, or a collapsed cutless bearing. Is longline only a commercial thing? No. Recreational monofilament and trap line can be just as long, and it's often cheaper. I've pulled 200-foot drop lines someone left on a wreck. The commercial guys deploy properly and track their gear. The weekend fishermen lose theirs in a current, and it ends up here. So it's everyone's problem.