"Buy a new windlass that can handle a rope-chain splice" ;-)

I'm gonna have to haunt some other forums and see what people with those 'old fashioned' windlasses do. It really does seem to be a bizarre problem in operating those windlasses, transferring the load from the rope to the chain side in any kind of swell. Perhaps the old timers were just tougher than you and me ;-) Or maybe they used ONLY chain...now that would solve the problem!