I have heard from a lot of people in the past about reaplacing their boot laces with 550 cord. Seems like a great idea to me. For compact cordage in general I like 100# Firewire which can be found any place with deep sea fishing equipment. For anything having more than 100# of strength, I haven't yet found anything with a better compactness/usefullness ratio than true 7 strand 550 paracord.