A Sailing Blade

At sea, sailors work for hours or days or months within the limits of their toerails. They duck through a web of standing and running rigging, constantly balancing, minding their footing, and keeping a sailor’s covenant: One hand for the boat, one for yourself. The ancient threat of the sea is always in mind: that beyond the rails, things get wet and chancy.

Sailors are not pedestrians. They don’t need car keys or change for the parking meter. What they carry is necessary, one or two basic tools. One crucial tool is a knife. It’s not optional, and it isn’t occasional. An experienced sailor has his knife within quick reach all of his waking hours afloat.

A knife is a personal tool. But the demands on a sailing knife are so specific that no sailor can afford to buy a knife haphazardly, simply because it looks cool. The criteria for a sailing knife are subtle and occasionally unexpected. Before you choose, review a few of them in a pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts light.

C. W. Ashley’s Book of Knots often cites line’s wicked propensity for mischief—its “malevolent intelligence.” Idle, seemingly benign line will throw a timber hitch around your foot, snag anything sticking innocently out of your clothing, or lasso your neck with a lazy loop. It’s a seagoing corollary of Murphy’s Law: Any critical limb, tool, item, or arrangement will be snared by a line; the snare will seize its object at the worst, most life-threatening, or most expensive time.

Why a Knife?

Even in a mild breeze, the smallest sail generates mortally dangerous forces. In a stiff breeze or in the heat of a race, the potential for disaster rises alarmingly. Lines suddenly whip out or snap taut, bronze or stainless fittings burst under strain. If a line has snared you or a shipmate, there’s only a moment to save the situation. Your first thought should be to relieve the pressure. Cut the line. Line’s valuable, for certain, but you can make it back to the dock with a jury rig or with one sail, or even motoring. You can’t replace a life. Cut the line. Be ready.

Yes, the big dramatic use for a sailing knife is to save lives and limbs. Let’s hope, however, that most of your sailing isn’t especially dramatic. Life on a boat is fairly basic, and the knife is a basic tool. Day by day, dozens of things need a cutting edge: whipping line, cutting line to length, trimming splices, cutting seizings, nipping off a hank of small stuff, and opening the damn bombproof plastic packaging of new AA batteries.

A sailing knife is expected to have the heft and stiffness, the basic strength, to be a widely adaptable tool. You’ll use it for prying stuck storage drawers and opening force-fit lids of various marine gunks. You’ll use it as a lever, and even as a small hammer to recall small parts to their duty.

Cutting line is not like cutting a cantaloupe. All line, laid and braided, is a matrix of twisted fiber that flexes as the strain changes. Line can be seen as a free-standing collector of grit and sand. Dirt is drawn in, and works its way into the flexing structure of whatever fiber it’s made of. When you cut line, you’re encountering the grit and inevitably dulling your knife. Sharpening is part of keeping your knife ready.

Knife Steel and a Few Knife Styles

Some gearheads may insist that a good sailing knife is necessarily stainless steel. For marine use the concept of “stainless” is a fond hope more than a certainty. Look at old “stainless” boat fittings and notice the blotches. There are a dozen common metallurgical blends called “stainless,” some of them better than others in strength, non-rusting, price, edge-keeping, and ductility. This last factor indicates a metal’s plasticity. Early stainless blends were so ductile that sharpening invariably drew out a “feather edge,” which folded over and occluded the cutting edge. Stropping—bending the feather edge back and forth until it fatigues away at the thinnest point—is sometimes necessary even for steels with a more brittle nature.

The fact is that no steel is invulnerable. And in fact, there were sailors before stainless steel was possible. Indeed, some respected knifemakers—David Boye is one—maintain that “old” steel forged before World War II had a coarser microscopic structure that held a better edge than modern “smoother” steels and later stainless alloys. A high-carbon steel knife can be a good tool if it’s used often, cleaned and whetted often, and given a bit of machine oil to protect it. The old cowboy phrase, “rode hard and put away wet,” won’t do for non-stainless blades, but minor attention should protect a high-carbon sailing knife.

David’s sailing knives (Boyeknives.com) are made of a proprietary Cobalt Dendritic Steel that takes advantage of the metal’s crystalline structure, which is at right angles to the blade edge, to provide nano-teeth that cut the fibers microscopically.

John Myerchin is an experienced sailor. Myerchin, Inc. makes sailing knives exclusively. He confirms the “toothed” value of “old steel” and reiterates that a traditional carbon steel knife needs daily wiping with light machine oil to prevent rust from corroding the delicate blade edge.

John carries a modern knife, one of his own plainedge folders, but uses a re-forming technique: he dutifully sharpens his blade, then takes a few swipes at right angles to the edge with a coarse diamond stone. This final retexturing creates the microscopic teeth that will rip through line. When he needs his blade for careful cutting work, he re-smooths the edge with a ceramic stone to a razor edge in only a few passes.

Choosing a Knife

The major forces encountered in sailing demand a robust blade that won’t bend, snap, or waver. Dealing with strong marine line of any size demands a critical sharpness. Your knife won’t be a one with which you’ll want to play mumblety-peg. It won’t be one of those “perpetually sharp” knives you find in suburban kitchens. (“I can’t understand why it’s so dull. It was sharp when I bought it.”) The prudent mariner whets his sailing knife obsessively and settles only for a hard-working edge.

A note on drama: A knife is a knife. It’s damn useful for cutting thread, peeling oranges, opening packages…for everything a knife should do. Yes, a sailor’s knife is an essential bit of safety gear. Yes, you should choose it with disaster in mind. But you should also choose a knife that will make an amiable companion for all your picayune activity on and off watch. A drop-point shape can be used for nearly everything, though you must beware the point. Do you need a point? Often. Do you need a stiletto point like a Fairburn fighting dagger? Never.

Blade Shape

The shape of your blade makes a difference—in profile and in section. There are dozens of blade shapes produced by knifemakers for specific purposes. Since it’s doubtful you’ll be testing citrus fruit or castrating sheep (both have special blades), we’ll concentrate on a few practical shapes.

The clip-point blade looks official and features a wicked-looking point. It’s designed for puncturing, which is not a big sailing priority. This traditional blade shape, in a radical form, is the pattern for the archetypal Bowie knife, the famous man-killing blade. Puh-lease: unless you’re a Malay pirate, you don’t need anything like a Bowie knife.

The sheepsfoot blade has a round end, an old favorite with many rigging knives because the blunt round end won’t puncture you or, say, the life raft you’re in. Its cutting edge is straight.

The Wharncliffe blade is another straight edge, but the end curves to a point. There are uses for straight cutting edges and uses for points. Experience will inform you.

The spearpoint blade has a point and a compound cutting edge—straight leading into a curve at the point. The point of this shape is thin—delicate but useful for some careful work.

The straight-back blade has a cutting edge that curves to the straight, strong back.

The drop-point blade is a more recent compromise. It carries some back-blade heft right to the point for strength and has a gently curving cutting edge that many find useful.

Fixed vs. Folding?

In choosing a knife, the decision tree’s first branching is fixed-blade versus folding-blade. There’s no middle ground here. A fixed-blade knife is stronger, less apt to break when abusing your knife (and you will), and often makes a slimmer package. A fixed blade requires a sheath to keep the cutting edge away from you, and to keep it away from getting dinged and dulled.

A folding blade is less conspicuous, lower profile, and more compact, and it won’t snag as easily in the rigging. It’s almost as easy to deploy as a fixed blade, but you should not rely on a fingernail nick ground into the blade for this purpose. Thumb-studs and blade cutouts will facilitate one-handed opening. The sheath for a folding blade can be nothing more than a sturdy pocket seam that holds its clip.

A folding knife should also have a lock that keeps it in the open position. Blade locks have improved over time, and the likelihood of a folding knife collapsing on your hand is less likely than before, but still possible. The simplest and most common lock, the Walker lock, is a spring liner bar that snaps behind the blade’s tang when it’s fully swung out. To refold the knife, you push the “jimped” (filed or cut-into-ridges) liner back to the side. A caveat: The Walker lock is a good engineering solution, but left-handers may find it difficult to manipulate quickly.

The lock-back lock is a spring-bar that locks behind a detent in the blade-back at the pivot. It’s unlocked by depressing the spring-bar into a notch on the back of the knife’s handle. This is a more ambidextrous folding method than the previous one, but the choice is chocolate or vanilla—merely personal preference.

There are many types of folding-knife lock-open devices, and all of them have a common enemy: pocket fluff. The lint that collects in pockets can jam any lock with disastrous results. Patrol any folding knife’s liners for pocket fluff.

Even with a good lock, a folding knife’s pivot is a stress-failure point; folding knives simply aren’t as strong as fixed blades. Fixed or folding? It’s your choice. The overall decision priority is this: Will you have the knife instantly when you need it?

Serrated or Smooth?

Another branching on the decision tree is controversial: Serrated or smooth edge?

Some knifemakers insist that serrated blades cut line faster. It’s true that the serrations “grab” at the line’s fibers quickly, concentrate force on smaller areas, and have a fiercer aspect. Do they cut better or quicker? It depends.

Cut a line with a very sharp knife, and it will be a clean cut. Cut it with a sharp serrated blade, and the result will be a furry mess.

There’s another consideration here: Your plainedge sailing knife will get dull, but with a little practice you can bring it back to fearsome standards. But your serrated blade will get dull just as quickly, and sharpening any of the fiercer serrations to a bosun’s standards is a challenge for a professional knife sharpener.

If you intend to lose your sailing knife overboard and replace it quickly, the original serrations are fine. The Gerber EZ Out Blunt Tip Rescue Knife (www.gerber-tools.com) is an excellent tool. Out of the box it should cut line in a flash. But that wavy, complex blade will never make it a pocket companion for other chores. If it’s used daily, its factory edge will dull. Resharpening a fully serrated 3″ blade with twenty grooves—six wide and fourteen narrow—is an investment of time and focus requiring at least one and perhaps two diameters of ceramic or diamond sharpening steels, or a fine tapered chainsaw file. The EZ Out is a well-designed emergency knife. Its blunt tip is comforting to you and your shipmates. Perhaps this kind of emergency knife belongs clipped to your life vest, a Mayday Mayday fallback, while the folding knife clipped handy to your pocket is the plain-edged knife of choice for non-hair-raising situations.

There is no perfect sailing knife, only intelligent choices. Some may stretch your budget but be lifelong companions. Still, you don’t need a trust fund to buy an excellent knife for your adventures afloat. Pick and choose. Every knife will require some maintenance, some more than others, and old carbon steel most of all. If your knife saves a life, that’s perfection, no matter how much it cost or how much time it cost to keep it in shape. But the takeaway lesson here is that your knife must be a friend, a tool you know intimately, care for obsessively, and keep at your side incessantly.

Companions to the Knife, and a Note on Carrying

There are many things that you simply should not carry with you on a boat (see list, page 8), but the knife has some worthy companions that you should consider as part of your kit. Some improvisational engineering can be done with a good sailing knife, but there are a few tools that are traditionally grouped, and often packaged in the same sheath: sailing knife, marlinespike, pliers, sail needle. You can do a world of prevention and correction with these.

The Marlinespike

Use of the marlinespike, alone, could bear an entire treatise, but we’ll mention briefly that an able-bodied sailor uses it for more than splicing. Its robust nature makes it an obvious twisting, prying, tamping, holing, and turning device.

Pliers

A pair of pliers gives you the grip to handle metal cotter pins and tighten whatever needs tightening. You might justify some slight additional weight in a sheath with the broader range of tasks they provide.

Multi-tools

Some contemporary folding knives include, in remarkably sleek packages, pliers, files, and blades all wrapped into one tool, and thus offer valuable abilities beyond cutting. Depending on the demands of one’s situation, these so-called “multi tools” be carried alone or in conjunction with a heavier, more accessible blade.

Carrying Your Knife

While we’re on the topic of carrying knives: Let’s have no nonsense about “neck knives.” Consider the earlier admonition on the malevolent intelligence of line: Anything firmly around your neck is bound to hang you, by and by. Any sharp knife hanging upside down is bound to come loose and perform inadvertent surgery on you, by and by. Anything small enough to hang around your neck and not incur bruises simply isn’t big enough for the job. Have we addressed this sufficiently?

Digging in your pocket for a Swiss Army Knife that needs two dry hands and a stout fingernail to open isn’t a viable solution. Your knife should be out and working in the instant after a problem appears. You have two choices: a sheath that places your knife in the same place, every time, or a clip that fastens your folding knife in the same pocket, same place, every time.

Your knife was right there, ready to hand. You deployed it, you used it. So far, so good. Now you’ve got a sharp thing in your hand that’s a danger to you and your shipmates while you continue the job. Putting it away is almost as important as grabbing it. As a safety concern, it’s just as important. Consider how you’ll put your knife away in an instant, having it ready for further use but safe and out of the way.

What Not to Carry

What you don’t carry on deck is as important as what you carry. Now that we’ve covered the use, care, and carrying of knives, here’s a list of things to leave at home:

Nothing should go around your neck that will hold your weight. This would be called a hangman’s noose. Cotton string, maybe. Braided Dacron, no. Ashley’s caution against line’s malevolent intelligence is no empty threat.
Your wedding ring or pinky ring may be a holy covenant or a handsome decoration, but take it off. No intelligent woodworker retains a ring, and no sailor who desires the same number of digits in the evening as he had in the morning retains his. The simple act of swinging your body weight under a boom gallows or guiding a loaded halyard cable can snatch the edge of a ring and depart with your finger.
$6.75 in coins is a godsend in the bazaar but on deck (or, crikey, in the water) it’s only weight and trouble.
Stand-alone-stiff canvas painters or carpenter’s pants are a comfort in a keen wind, but useful-looking tool loops are preordained to catch on protrusions. Use your knife to get rid of them.

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