IF your boat has running backstays, chances are you will want to get them out of the way when not using them. If you are actually sailing you will want to get the leeward one secure so it does not bang around.

This usually means that you will have to first capture the runner floating off out to leeward, get out of the cockpit, walk forward along the lee rail holding onto the runner with one hand and the boat with the other and then secure the runner to something. Most folks tie them to the rail  or the rigging turn buckles where they must then repeat the trip when they need the runners again. The sooner and the faster you need them, as in “we gotta tack now”, the more of a drama this little exercise becomes.

Enter the “tricing lines”. A term from the Age of Sail, generally meaning to secure something, to tie it up, mainly sails.

Try this arrangement:

Secure a suitably sized block at the base of the rigging, like his fellow has, above. Either the aft lowers if you have them of the cap shrouds if you do not have aft lowers. In the picture above, the thicker bluish line is the runner’s tail, the lighter line rove through the block is the “tricing line”.

The rest of it looks like this:

The tricing line is secured here just above the rigging turnbuckle. The tricing line does not have to be secured, as in tied off- there are a variety of ways of attaching the line to the runner tail. Some use a small block on the tail, some tie the tricing line to the runner block.

This set up has the line tied to the runner tail.

The tricing line is then led aft, via the block tied to the rigging to that mystical place in the sky,  a “convenient location where the most people can reach it, but it is out of the way……”

In this case on the cockpit coaming:

On this (Moody I think) with a center cockpit, the line and the cleat is positioned at the fore end of the cockpit. The dark shape to the left is a cover over the varnished hand rail.

Overall the arrangement on this boat looks line this:

Of course in this series of pictures the runners are tied off forward. When the runners are rigged, the tricing line passes up in the air, like for instance this arrangement on a 100 footer seen last summer:

The runner flying block seen here is about 12 feet up in the air, so no one can get beaned on the head, at least by this block. The tricing line is secured, it looks to me, directly to the runner block.

You get a sense of the blocks height here: the boat superstructure in white is the stern view of the large powerboat moored astern of the sailing boat I am photographing…… The tricing line is secured to the block which can be seen just to the picture-right of the dome on the power boat….

Because the boat is much larger, the tricing line leads forward to a block on the cap shrouds:

It then leads down to the deck and along the water ways aft to a position, adjacent the runner winches usually on this size boat:

The end of the Tricing Line is seen here secured on the stanchion. The much thicker line is the ships mooring line.

With a tricing line one can pull the runners out of the way, secure them forward and recover them without ones hands leaving ones arms or having any one leave the cockpit.

Pass me my  coffee please!!