If you are looking for really cheap and effective chafing gear for your dock lines get some of those foam swim noodles. They have a hole down the middle that you thread your line through. Use a knife to easily cut them to whatever length you need. They come in many colors, so the admiral delights in being able to color coordinate them. I could give a crap about the color.
Mark : The swim noodles might hold up under normal WX,
but I recommend that you use a piece of clear water hose if you really want something cheap that will hold up in a storm. A thought
For those of you on a mooring... the "noodles" are great to have on your painters as floats to keep the lines from sinking and wrapping your mooring ball chain!
I keep a line from my swim ladder to the water at the stern, so that a person in the water can deploy the ladder. I've always worried that it would wrap around the prop, but didn't want to use polypropaline line because it gets brittle from the sun. I wonder if a noddle would be a solution to this? (especially if I could get one that was white so it wouldn't stand out so much). Thanks for the idea.