The Medway Handyman wrote:

On 20/02/2011 15:15, john reeves wrote:

I've tried that trick sailors use in giving it a small twist every time
you reel it around your arm, but its just a bit too stiff to do that
successfully.

No sailor would wind a rope or cable around his arm!

Agreed.

Coil it loose & twist each time.

No. Do not twist. Twisting is what leads to kinking and tangling.

The correct way to coil a cable, rope, or hose, is to imagine that
it were a flat ribbon with the two sides a different colour. Suppose
the ribbon is lying flat on the ground with no twists in it so that
the blue side is on top and the red side underneath.

(For a right handed person hold the end of the cable in your
left hand blue side up. Grasp the cable with your right hand,
holding it blue side up, then bring your right hand towards your
left hand and just place the cable onto what is already there, so
that it stays blue side up during the whole move. The action of
your right hand does not involve any twisting. You just lift a bit
of cable straight up and plonk it down again, as if you were lifting
a chess piece from one square and putting it down on another.

If the cable is stiff, a side effect of this will be that each coil
will end up with a self-cancelling double twist in it, and will most
likely hang in a figure of eight pattern. But that's the idea.