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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.
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