Rope Cutter

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In areas where there are a lot of fish pots and fish traps, a propeller rope cutter is a necessary modification. While I'm not sure if the exciting episode of an almost-sinking of a charter boat in the Grand Case anchorage of St. Martin in 2013 could have been avoided with a rope cutter, I believe it could have (their dinghy painter got caught in the propeller but the dinghy was beside the boat, so it ripped the P-Strut out of its mount which opened up a long crack for seawater to enter, plus it bent the prop shaft). I had an episode on the old Zanshin as well, where despite a rope cutter I still had some problems off St. Kitts and Nevis.
While I believe that Zanshin's strut and shaft are made of sterner stuff, I would hate to run into a fish trap while motoring and have the engine and prop become inoperative! Some islands in the Caribbean are terrible for having densely packed and near-invisible fish traps. Instead of using large and boldly coloured trap markers, they use Clorox, detergent or sometimes even clear plastic containers - none of which are easy to see and near-impossible to see when going westwards (into the sun) towards sunset.

The serrated edges of the ropecutter on Zanshin are quite sharp, I needed a bandaid during the cleaning process. (2013-12-31 09:01:55 NIKON D7100 with a "18.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6" lens. [f/25.0, 1/100s] ISO 1800)

The folded (and cleaned) propeller and ropecutter on Zanshin. (2013-12-29 13:08:14 NIKON D7100 with a "18.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6" lens. [f/7.1, 1/125s] ISO 100)

This is what my shaft and propeller looked like after catching (and cutting) a polypropylene fishing line while on passage from Nevis to Antigua. [17°0'54.19"N 61°46'36.36"W ]

The rope cutter had done a good job of cutting the polypropylene fishin line that I'd caught while motorsailing off Nevis, but some had wrapped and melted into the crevice shown here and more had fouled on the propeller itself. (2009-03-10 19:39:26 DSC-N2 [f/2.8, 10/2500s] ISO 160)