Left & Right Winches, and Mast Climbing Safety

When left and right winches meet in the same pit

Following up on marking your winches — here’s what it actually looks like at the professional end of the sport. Racing on a big offshore raceboat this week, the starboard pit runs genuinely mixed winch handing: right-hand and left-hand winches sitting side by side, deliberately opposite each other across the pit.

The reason isn’t arbitrary. Lines lead from the clutch bank through a set of deck organizers positioned between the two winches, running in opposite directions to each side. Running opposite-handed winches minimises the lead angle onto those organizers — a small mechanical efficiency that matters when you’re grinding under load in a breeze. It does add a layer of chaos in a fast mark rounding, trying to register which winch is which under pressure. Which is exactly why, even at professional level on a serious offshore campaign, the winches are still marked with arrows. If the pros need them, there’s no reason your own cruising boat shouldn’t have them too.

What actually keeps you alive going up a rig

Rig work is a regular part of the job, and the gear behind it deserves more attention than it usually gets. The foundation is a Petzl arborist-style harness — a full climbing harness with leg restraints, a waist belt, and a proper over-shoulder harness, all tied together at a single connection point on the back with multiple lifting points. The addition that actually makes long days aloft survivable is the seat that comes with it. Four days up a rig, eight in the morning until six at night, only works because of that seat — without it, the harness alone isn’t something you last hours in.

Fall arrest is the next critical layer. A dedicated fall arrest device connects to the harness via a side-mounted carabiner rather than a rear one — a deliberate choice, since a side connection point is still reachable and adjustable if something goes wrong mid-fall, where a back-mounted point isn’t. This system runs on a completely separate line from the primary halyard being climbed on, so a failure of the main connection isn’t the only thing standing between a climber and the deck. Built into that fall arrest line is a woven energy absorber — stitched webbing designed to progressively tear apart under load, absorbing the shock of a fall rather than transmitting it straight through the body. The backup line itself is dynamic rather than static, with genuine stretch built in as a second layer of shock absorption.

None of that replaces the most important piece of the system: the person on the winch. Whoever’s on deck controlling the halyard is, in practical terms, the other half of the safety system — get that communication wrong and no amount of harness engineering fully compensates. Comms radios are the usual method, but when they’re not available, well-practiced hand signals do the job just as reliably, precisely because they don’t depend on batteries or a connection that can fail.

---