Mark Your Winches

It only takes one runaway halyard to teach you why this matters.

Olly learned it the hard way, early on — still working out how winches turn, cranked one the wrong direction, and had a kite halyard zip straight out of his hands before anyone could stop it. No harm done, but it’s exactly the kind of moment that sticks with you, and it’s completely avoidable.

Ninety-nine percent of winches are right-hand — they turn clockwise, and that’s what every cruising boat is set up with. A small number of race boats run left-hand winches instead, and if you’re not expecting it, that’s exactly when a wrong turn happens fast. Mixing the two on the same boat, or moving between boats that aren’t set up the same way, is where the confusion creeps in.

The fix costs nothing and takes five minutes: mark the direction on top of each winch. A bold arrow — red, orange, even glow-in-the-dark tape — makes the correct direction obvious at a glance, no thinking required. It’s not a sign of a badly set-up boat. It’s a sign of a boat where the kids know exactly which way to turn a handle before they’re asked to use one, and where nobody has to guess under pressure.

Cheap, quick, and it’s saved us more than one moment of heartache since.

It’s not just a cruising-boat trick, either. At the professional end of the sport, mixed-handed winches make marking essential rather than optional — we go into why in Left & Right Winches, and Mast Climbing Safety.

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