Shaft cutters

Good day all
We will be launching in Tracy's Landing MD and bringing our 39.4 Sea Ranger home to St Catharines Ontario what is the consensus on shaft cutters and cruising the chessapeak , Delaware and north to the hudson any input would be great
Thanks
Waterview

Greetings,
We constantly cruise in areas with crab pots and don't have shaft cutters nor have we ever had them. We DID on one occasion pick up a piece of line (no damage done) which was only discovered by the diver cleaning the hull so I don't know if it was a whole pot line or just a stray piece of flotsam. Other than causing damage to the boat my greater concern is the loss of the pot and subsequent financial loss to the fisherman. I can afford the insurance but the waterman is going to lose the income. $.02.

Have had them on previous boat and current one. They work (sometimes). Some lobster fishermen around here don't like to see them but some use them themselves. Gone the prop cage route now. Has its own drawbacks, but so far the peace of mind is well worth it.

A test of some available by Sailing Today: http://www.ropestripper.com/documents/st-ropecutters.pdf


Some discussion here: Panbo: The Marine Electronics Hub: Shaft Razor long test, with a look at the competition

They can be nice to have but hardly mandatory. Look at it this way, most boats run around without them and they have few fouling issues.

Drift nets in the night particularly in the Pacific convinced me years ago as to the benefits of line cutters. My last encounter with one was 2012 to the west of Princess Royal Is in BC. It took about 5 minutes to chew up the lines and net fouled around the shaft and prop.

Thanks to all for your responses more research required by me
Thanks again

I dove for TowBoat US in the Penobscot Bay in Maine for 5 summers. It was great fun and I made lifelong friends from it (by cutting boats free). Every call I went on was a boat picking up more than one lobster pot.

From the 5 years, 50% of the boats I cut free had cutters. Spurs were the most common that I came across. There are different conclusions you can come to from those findings - either cutters don't do anything or they give the pilot a false sense of security and they are then more careless.

Either way, I have no cutters on my twin props hanging out begging to have some type of pot picked up - and I still live in Maine with all those lobster pots. So far, I haven't picked up anything in now our 12th year with the trawler.

My boat came equipped with "The Shark" cutters. I believe they have worked a couple of times but usually I miss the lines. So far I have never been stopped by a wrapped line, I have backed off a couple.

ActiveCaptain said:

I dove for TowBoat US in the Penobscot Bay in Maine for 5 summers. It was great fun and I made lifelong friends from it (by cutting boats free). Every call I went on was a boat picking up more than one lobster pot.

From the 5 years, 50% of the boats I cut free had cutters. Spurs with the most common that I came across. There are different conclusions you can come to from those findings - either cutters don't do anything or they give the pilot a false sense of security and they are then more careless.

Either way, I have no cutters on my twin props hanging out begging to have some type of pot picked up - and I still live in Maine with all those lobster pots. So far, I haven't picked up anything in now our 12th year with the trawler.

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No wonder you like it when I am the canary.

We have a Shaft Shark on our Catalina and wouldn't cruise the Chesapeake without it. We do everything we can to avoid the crab pots and I don't think we have ever actually got one fouled in our prop but we feel much more secure knowing that we have the cutter installed.

gwkiwi said:

No wonder you like it when I am the canary.

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Rule-of-thumb: Always be the second boat!

Gerald, I'll follow you anywhere - just saw your boat at Charleston Harbor Marina as we pulled in today...

In LI Sound and on up to Maine shaft choppers would be worthwhile.

Esp in Maine , where it gets foggy and some lobster guys string their traps INSIDE the channel from buoy to buoy so they can find them.

Eyeballs work , but in the fog its a bear.

Just running the Chessy and up the Hudson Eyeball MK 1 Mod 0, in daylight is all you need .

"...either cutters don't do anything or they give the pilot a false sense of security and they are then more careless."

I have to disagree with that statement. I had a set of Spurs cutters installed on my boat when it was built. The cutters are effective. They will cut rope, they do not give me a false sense of security, and I'm not more careless.

I do everything I can to avoid trap lines. If I didn't have the Spurs and I hit a line I'd have to dive over and cut the line anyway. The Spurs just keep me from getting wet.
The end result for the trap line is the same, it's cut.


"Eyeballs work , but in the fog its a bear."

Night makes it difficult as well and not all floating rope has a nice visible buoy tied to it.

HopCar said:

I do everything I can to avoid trap lines. If I didn't have the Spurs and I hit a line I'd have to dive over and cut the line anyway. The Spurs just keep me from getting wet.

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It's great that you feel that way. It doesn't change the fact that I dove on plenty of boats that had picked up traps only to cut them away and find Spurs installed. If it had happened once or twice in 5 years, I'd think the Spurs were just overloaded or something. If you saw them time and time again, you'd come to the same conclusion as me.

Keep avoiding the traps you see. That's probably what's keeping you from diving over and getting wet.

We have 'em never had to use them though so couldn't attest to their ability to do what their mad to do.

ActiveCaptain said:

I dove for TowBoat US in the Penobscot Bay in Maine for 5 summers. It was great fun and I made lifelong friends from it (by cutting boats free). Every call I went on was a boat picking up more than one lobster pot.

From the 5 years, 50% of the boats I cut free had cutters. Spurs were the most common that I came across. There are different conclusions you can come to from those findings - either cutters don't do anything or they give the pilot a false sense of security and they are then more careless.

Either way, I have no cutters on my twin props hanging out begging to have some type of pot picked up - and I still live in Maine with all those lobster pots. So far, I haven't picked up anything in now our 12th year with the trawler.

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In speaking to the diver that finally had to get the lines off my prop, he said that line cutters only work 50% of the time and that he has daily customers, Lobster boats, that he checks every morning.

Also, every lobster boat I saw out of the water in Maine had some kind of cutter, usually just the disk type.

We picked up a crab pot during a very high tide in GA. I thought the boat was holed because it made such a bump and noise. We limped forward on one motor. Had I known I would have looked, and instead we had to pay for a short haul.

I had a lobster boat in Maine. It was a really traditional one. Like most of them, they have cages around the prop. They cost at least 1/2 knot of speed but they let you move through anything with no fear.

Most lobstermen wouldn't want anything that would cut lines on their shafts.

I've accidently gone dead nuts head on to numerous trap bouys, and only got one that wrapped on the shaft. It seems on the single screw the boat has a good chance of pushing it one way or the other before the screw gets to it. On my previous twin screw boat, my luck was much worse.

I'm in the "no line cutter" camp, but barely. Had to dive in 45F water once on the twin screw to get a crab pot off the wheel. No wetsuit. No fun.

Active Captain quote - From the 5 years, 50% of the boats I cut free had cutters. Spurs were the most common that I came across. There are different conclusions you can come to from those findings - either cutters don't do anything or they give the pilot a false sense of security and they are then more careless.


You seem to be implying that they're worthless. Isn't the likelihood that they sometimes actually worked as advertised, and you didn't get called to cut them free?

Should I not add them then?

Sometimes we don't know what we don't know.

I have three cutters, Sepp, Anna Clare and Anton. They work fine but they are expensive

Nsail said:

You seem to be implying that they're worthless. Isn't the likelihood that they sometimes actually worked as advertised, and you didn't get called to cut them free?

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I gave my findings. 50% of the boat grabbing lines had cutters. Does 50% of the boat population that would need to call TowBoat US for line cutting have cutters? My guess, and it's a complete guess, is that maybe 25% of the boats have cutters. So if they were just worthless, you'd expect 25% of the boats to have cutters, right?

Of course, if 75% of the boat had cutters, the meaning of the data might be different.

I don't have cutters on my twin engine trawler and I've lived in Maine for the last 21 years although most of my trawlering hours have been done outside of Maine. I have never picked up a pot on my trawler (I did pick up one pot on another smaller cruising boat in 1998).

The evaluation of all of this is left as an exercise to the reader.

I had cutters (spurs) on my mainship for 14 seasons. Cut 3 bouys off in that time, all of them were below the waterline because of strong currents. There was never any doubt when the lines were cut. It makes an obvious noise.
I also have a line cutter on my Albin, but haven,t cut anything other than a fishing line.
I do avoid all pot bouys, but sometimes theysneak up on you.

I do not have them but have mentally debated the issue.

Jay is correct in that often it's the ones you CAN'T see that get you or just the floating line where someone else already cut the float off.

Even if they work 20% of the time on a given boat...they pay for themselves over a lifetime...even if it's just the aggravation of having to cut the line off yourself.

If you have never sucked a whole crab trap up into you prop...you are really missing out on all the fun.

Two summers ago I sucked the whole trap into the prop of my assistance towboat. On that boat I can reach a lot so I was able to wrench the pot off...but the bad news is the newer pots have rebar in them for weight,,,that rebar took two turns around the shaft/prop and was stopping my 454 dead cold.

The only time in 11 years I couldn't make it back to the dock on my own, had to get emergency ahauled...as I was on my way to a jet skier drifting rather quickly towards Bermuda as he had to wait almost 2 hours from the time he called.

So if the cutter had worked just that one time...it would have been worth it on the towboat.

Of course goal #1 is to not run anything over, but I can thing of two cases where that's easier said than done.

The first is running at night where you can't see the buggers.

The second is in Maine where for some reason the State and lobstermen think it's a good idea to blanket all navigable waters with lobster traps.

After dodging lobster traps my whole life and never getting caught, I went to Maine and promptly got tangled in one. After that cutters were installed.

Unfortunately, cutters are a bit like fuel additives and different brands of oil - not having a problem does not prove effectiveness. With cutters, the only proof of effectiveness would be shredded line in your wake. So far I haven't seen that, but I also haven't been back to Maine. In the mean time, I'll keep my cutters.

I have noted for years on TF that if one doesn't have item X on their vessel that it is not necessary for others either. TFites go to some interesting extremes in justifying the side of the coin they are on for items such as

Cutters
Genset chargers
Active stabilizers
AIS
Twin engines
SD hulls
Large fuel tanks
Anchors and rode
3 stage fuel filters
Vessels over XX length
Electronic diesels
Etc

In a way, it is the new stuff, gadget or gizmo haves vs the have nots.

Greetings,
Mr. s. Extremes? On TF?

So true.

Cutters
Genset chargers
Active stabilizers
AIS
Twin engines
SD hulls
Large fuel tanks
Anchors and rode
3 stage fuel filters
Vessels over XX length
Electronic diesels
Etc



Many are desirements that justify never leaning the dock.