It's a neat skill that you can practice while sitting in the interminable meetings that seem to bedevil much of contemporary life. Here's a great site with animations for the many knots you might want to learn.
Manly Skills: Knot Tying
Probably because I first learned about knots and their many excellent uses in the Boy Scouts, I think of them as a particularly manly skill that is appropriate to coming of age and proving one's worth in that regard. Nevertheless the last complex knot I learned was actually taught to me by a woman I know, the one listed here as "Bowline on a Bight." (This is the knot list for Technical Rescue: Ropes Basic, and yes, I can tie all of these knots and more).
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11 comments:
I can do the overhand and the figure 8, but knot the others.
Cool website. I've learned and forgotten a number of these. Time for a refresher! And to learn some new ones.
A whole category of rope work that didn't make this list, but which has been of tremendous use to me over the years, is lashing. Lashing furniture up into moving vans is something I've done more of than I ever wanted to do over the years; it's also great for setting up cooking tripods and other camp furniture.
Knowing what knot not to use also valuable info- the prime feature of some is also the main liability. i.e. never use a bowline to moor a craft, never use half hitches to carry a heavy load.
"It's a neat skill that you can practice while sitting in the interminable meetings that seem to bedevil much of contemporary life."
This is where a fiendish Jack Nicholson type grin and a hangmans knot is useful.
“…never use half hitches to carry a heavy load…”
Not a single one, no, but the two-half-hitches is quite secure; and ‘three half-hitches is more than a king’s yacht wants,’ as the old saying goes.
two-half-hitches is quite secure
I've heard some wise men suggest that one is none, two is one, three is backup.
Eric Hines
We use a single half hitch as part of a system to move heavy tools like sledgehammers. Hammer is head down for this. You put a secure loop knot like a bowline or a figure-8-on-a-bite around the handle, loop it once around the head, then a half hitch around the handle, and use the hammer weight to keep the system tension while you lift it. It’s functional in a system like that; even the second half hitch is unnecessary.
I meant a really heavy load-like a tow, or attached to a clew on a sail- it's not that it won't hold it, it's that it may be very difficult to untie. A bowline has the opposite condition- with a fluctuating load, loose, then tight, then loose, it can untie itself -noticeable in tidal estuaries when you come back to find your boat gone.
Yeah, you definitely want a long tail and a safety on a bowline if it’s for serious use.
It’s such an interesting field. There’s always more to know.
A bowline can be turned into a more secure knot by an extra turn on the tail- ie "the squirrel goes around the tree and through the hole" twice. This is called a "cherry bend."
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