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Later that night, snug abed, I woke up thinking about a comment Jim made about using just one long dock line, one end cleated at the bow, the other at the stern. I've fouled a dock line on my prop twice, and compensated for that idiocy by keeping my docklines short. 

Not good. With short docklines, you can't shove the boat comfortably away from you to get easy angles on the lines to walk the boat. With one long dockline, I could drop one end and be able to recover it. 

A little more snoozing and it came to me that if I approached the end of the finger dock at 90 degrees to the slip with the wind over my starboard quarter it left me with a nice escape route. Flub the approach and I could just power up and keep going without having to fight inertia or the wind, and with nothing directly in front of me. That's when I decided I would park my boat where I darn well pleased, and that I didn't have to begging for an easier slip. 

The next morning I grabbed a 50 foot line, two and a half times my LOA, and worked an eye splice into each end. Now the problem was how to keep my silly self from letting that line end up around my prop. 

Loose lines on a boat are a menace, props notwithstanding, but I hit on a solution that worked well for me. Feel free to heckle, and I'll agree in advance this is not a good idea for the knot-impaired. 

I led the line aft from my bow bitt along the side deck, and doubled it up against its other end, the one secured to my stern cleat. I formed a bight, which I passed halfway around my port boom gallows stanchion, which I secured by passing a second bight made from the doubled standing end around the opposite side of the stanchion. Nothing wrapped all the way around, in other words, but still held to the stanchion. Then I just chained a few more slipped half hitches, single braid sennit style, to take up line. 

Horse people have a name for that kind of arrangement. The idea is that the horse can't pull his reins off a hitching rail, but a light tug on the bitter end of the reins makes them fall away cleanly. You can see a little of how I secured my docklines here - check out my port boom gallows stanchion: 

<img src='content_image/707732.jpg'>

The really big powerboat in the background is the aircraft carrier Lexington, moored in Corpus as a musuem. 

That horse knot, whatever it's called, kept my dockline snug and out of trouble on the side deck yet a gentle pull on the end would cause 50 feet of dockline to fall free without fouling. 

Ideas that come in dreams are usually the best ones, but I tested my theories a time or two as well. One easy pull freed the dockline. Parking the free end loops of my chain of half hitches on top of a horn cleat kept it from falling free while I was still on the water. 

Coming back to the dock after a morning under sail, reefed and in enough wind to make docking a potential nightmare, I motored past my slip and rolled the wheel full starboard. I throttled back to neutral to avoid fighting prop walk, and spun the boat neatly around in the fairway, now coming up abeam to the end of the dock and drifting before the wind. 

A nudge in reverse slowed the boat to a crawl at the end of the dock just as it passed my position in the cockpit, but it also highlighted something to stay aware of. I had the wind at that point on my starboard quarter, and that burp in reverse ate up a good foot of clearance. The prop walk and the wind were both pushing the same direction. 

