Ropes and Knots

Yea.......it's kind of funny sometimes to see how different boats are tied up when it's not a basic cleat.

At one of our public docks there are no cleats but a hoop in the shape of and upside down "U".....you should see the various knots etc. it's quite funny.

Nice find Briand,

Knots and ropes, the nightmare of my childhood. When I started sailing as a small boy on our Yawl with my grandfather and / or my father, I had to learn all knots and the names of all the different ropes on the sailboat by heart and for me it ment, learning it the hard way. Any time I made a wrong knot for the wrong purpose, an incorrect knot or grabbed the wrong rope on a given command, I was told off or slapped on the neck. And hell, I could not remember those bloody knots. I was only allowed to sail my little dinghy on my own, after proofing my sound knowledge in this "absolutly vital part of true seamanship".



Still today, people are laughed down in yacht clubs and harbours, for making wrong knots and improper tiedowns on their sailboats. Boaters sometimes are real fanatics.

But Brian, you are correct. This stuff gets more and more forgotten.

Btw. One of the most famous red light districts in Europe, the Reeperbahn in Hamburg has its origin in ropes. The old German word Reeperbahn means Ropewalk. It was the place where the big ropes for sailing ships were made.

This is a great site for animated knot tying. http://www.animatedknots.com/snell/index.php?Categ=fishing

I want only add that in Venice are still preserved the "Corderie" of the Arsenal (corde means rope)
a building 316 metres long that now houses part of Venice Biennale art exibition.

With the development of high tech fibers like Dyneema knots make a comeback. Say in soft shackles. Different knots though.

That said, how many knots do you actually need? Half a dozen if you count the usual hitches and trow in a timber hitch for good measure?

I have this on my iPad and iPhone and have made a lot of use of it. We are lucky to have these aids to remind us while on the run. So easy to forget a fishing knot etc, when a season has gone by.
Well worth the cost of this app.

I have had to teach young guys how to tie the simplest knots. Even to tie a ladder to a rack on a truck. Without bungee cords or romex cable they'd be lost.
Used a clove hitch on a ladder rack and the kid with me said, after watching " I don't see how that's going to work !"
I said " Well, it's worked for sailors for 2000 years, it'll be good enough for us !"

Thanks for the link app.

My father once told me that there are only 2 kinds of knots, the one that doesn't work and the one that does.

Pretty simple I thought.

I used it to get the snell knots sorted for my long line hooks, I have also found that using a hi contrast colour line helps when I should really wear glasses for tying knots but don't always have them to hand.