What sort of Rope...?

What type of rope should you use to rig a Team Racing Firefly...?

There are lots of choices out there, however before purchasing rope for your Fireflies, there are a couple of general rules which are worth considering.

1. Team Racing Fireflies get a lot of heavy use, rope should be hard wearing. All rope will fail over time.
2. Control lines should be easy to replace; when they break they need to be quickly changed. Splicing lines onto your boats looks great however when they fail they are slow to replace - a real problem at an event! Much better to use a rope that holds a tied knot well and can be easily undone or cut.
3. Other than the main halyard, some stretch is a benefit on the lose rigged Firefly.
4. High performance fibres can shorten the life of other hardware items - eg. a Jib Halyard tension cleat will wear more quickly with an over-spec dyneema/spectra line.

In short, keep it simple! Often the slightly cheaper control line is a better choice. At kSail we stock a full range of rope and cordage which can be supplied in either full reels or pre-cut lengths.

From experience we have selected Kingfisher evo Performance and evo Sheet to use for most of our pre-cut lengths.