A Bit of Nautical Parlance
Bristol fashion: The difficult commercial port of Bristol on England’s southwest Avon River features a 30′ tidal range. Bristol craft ground out twice a day. In the unforgiving Age of Sail, only vessels with robust scantlings and cargoes stowed by a dutiful bosun returned to their waterlines undamaged. Hence: “well-done, well-fashioned, perhaps even obsessively maintained.”
Details count. They’re the ways we push “good enough” to “better.” Sailors are detail fiends. They know that a hard storm on a dark night will come, when little things will make the difference between a quick save and honest peril. They have an easy phrase for it: “Bristol fashion.”
A sailmaker’s palm, needles, and waxed twine are indispensible in the proper care of cordage.
Does your vessel present at its best? A bit of wear or a smattering of honorable fish gurry is expectable, even commendable, but does it look like the bosun died? Is it shipshape? Are your docklines, fender-nettles, signal halyards, and lanyards tight and well-finished? Is there an unwhipped (gasp!) line end aboard? As the boat gives its hydrodynamic soul to you, are you returning the compliment?
Let’s agree at the outset that there is more than one road to wisdom and a dozen clever ways to address every usage we’re suggesting. Our task is to encourage you to polish the Bristol fashion of your vessel.
Flemish Coils
Good line is tight and generally round in cross-section. A random line’s end anywhere on deck or dock is a remarkably effective device for overcoming friction—that is, for shooting your nonskid boat shoes out from under you. A pratfall by the water is not funny. It’s a primary danger, and there are two ways to mitigate it: on your deck walkabout, deal with any line-ends accessible to feet. Second, lay down the flat Flemish flake, a tight flat spiral used on a stationary boat or on a dock. The flat flake is wound from the outside in, clockwise, then tightened into a compact, foot-friendly unit by “winding the clock” with a flattened hand. It’s not an over-fussy decoration; it’s a practical safety procedure.
Some Deck Details
Fenders
Your fenders and lifeline gate are prominent introductions to any visitor. Gates are often secured with pelican hooks or spring-shackle hooks. The latter require easily gripped lanyards. You will find hundreds of possibilities, but one humble example is the two-strand square sennit, which is simple enough for your children to fashion. It can be finished with West Country whipping. Fenders require care and cleaning. They should be secured by respectable line. They are not attached to lifelines but to stanchions or cleats, and they hang (in most cases, depending on your hull and the dock or boat to which you tie up) just short of the waterline. You’re the skipper: determine how you want your fenders tied off, and make it consistent for your crew: a round turn and two half-hitches is a common holdfast.
Clearing the Toerail
Setting out is a delicate time. You’ve checked your “GO” list: engine, float plan, emergency equipment, communications. There’s awnother practical observance: the walkabout. Someone reliable is at the helm. The captain or the mate circumambulates the deck, observing keenly and conducting simple tasks: all fenders aboard and stowed in place, not trailing on the waterway. He or she also inspects for any sheet or dockline that might be dangling over the side. Might it be whipping in the hull’s boundary layer, about to wrap and stifle the propeller, about to become a major incident? Are lifelines taut and secure? Are forward hatches shut and dogged? A careful circuit with a critical eye may avert calamity. Part of the tour will also be an assessment of cotter pins, shackles, turnbuckles, coils, lashings, and wear or discoloration that could suggest incipient failure. Some skippers keep a dedicated pocket pad to note possible points of repair or replacement that spring from these inspections, which are routine but formal. The result should be a confident report: “A clear toerail.”
Tools and Materials
The Ditty Bag
The drawstring bag, satchel, box, or roll that collects all your line-working tools should be close by, reachable for this and that. This isn’t a bag for notions; it’s for serious sailor’s work.
What you need in this so-called “ditty bag” varies widely. You may have more than a single bag, reserving tools for isolated tasks—setting grommets or stainless-steel cable work—in a dedicated box. You may have a separate bag for cordage and small stuff—twine, cord, hard small braid, etc. The basics for most line work are straightforward:
- Marlinespike(s)
- Sailmaker’s palm
- Sail-repair tape for quick sail fixes
- Masking tape for marking line, stabilizing strand or braid ends
- Duct tape: you never know when you’ll need it
- Thin, sharp Wharncliffe utility knife for cutting line cleanly
- Long-nose butane lighter for fusing synthetic line ends
- Needlenose pliers
- Small wire clippers
- Full-sized scissors and small detail scissors or thread snips
- Nail clippers
- Cake of beeswax
- Sailmaker’s needles: a selection of sizes in a waterproof tube or box with desiccant
- Whipping twine: a selection of colors and sizes
- Hemostats (locking precision pliers), straight and curved
- Monel or stainless-steel seizing wire for mousing shackles
- Bungee cord and cord hooks
- Spare cotter pins, shackle pins, nylon buckle parts, and split rings
- Spare D, bow, and long-mouth screw-shackles in various sizes
- Tape measure
- Permanent marker
- Double-sided hook-and-loop fastening
- Common sewing gear
- Selection of common, large-eye sewing needles, sharps and darning
- Selection of polyester thread, small spools, in 9–12 colors
- Needle threader
- Curved upholstery needle
- Common pins
- Safety pins, various sizes
- Thimble
A Corrosive Atmosphere
Temperature variations and the pervasive humidity of a boat attack all your tools, especially delicate, articulated, edged, and pointed devices. Take pains to protect needles, pliers, carbon knives, and steel marlinespikes with a spray of lubricant or a desiccant packet within their bag.
Tape
Line is vulnerable where its internal matrix is interrupted at the bitter end. Masking tape restores temporary control of the loose threads while work is being done.
Cutting Line
A quick blow from a mallet or hammer onto the back edge of a straight-bladed knife makes a clean cut in line, which must be set on top of a block of wood. The speed of the cut is crucial to preserving the line’s integrity.
Stowing and Caring for Line
Coiling
It is a basic truth that line is only useful if you can get at it, and if it’s ready to use. Imagine this: on a night as dark as Jonah’s bunk in the whale, you go to fetch a critical length of line. You reach into the line locker. You encounter something like a barrel of fructifying eels or you feel the familiar, orderly shape of well-coiled, secured line. Every vessel needs The Word: “Listen up. This is how we’ll stow line on this here boat.” We have suggestions.
First, a basic difference in coiling laid and braided line. Laid line (“normal” Z or hawser-laid) is coiled clockwise, giving each turn a half-twist to keep the coil neat. Braided line is less forgiving of rotational forces. It is coiled more efficiently by alternating coils: normal clockwise loops, then “inverted” ones. We learned this from our rock n’ roll roadie friends who coiled speaker cables (which is even less rotationally forgiving) alternately. The first coil is picked up palm-in and coiled clockwise. The second coil is picked up with a hand turned palm-out, then twisted palm-in, up into the coil. Done this way, palm-in, palm-out, the braided coil will lie more neatly, uncoil more readily, and present fewer hockles.
The Sea Gasket
Once your coils are made—orderly and not too short, please, and never around the elbow—you have a choice of securing them. There are a number of ways of doing this, but very few function as well as the sea-gasket. Skippers may and should impose their preferences for order by making it clear that all line is stowed consistently. We prefer a three-turn sea-gasket, shown at left, so that someone coming from Jonah’s bunk can deploy the line quickly and easily, ready to use.
Coiling Small Stuff
Clifford W. Ashley, whose classic tome, The Ashley Book of Knots, remains the standard introduction to ropework, gives us a handy and consistent holdfast for small stuff in his simple small coil fastening, shown above.
Relaxing Line
If your line begins to complain, with hockles and awkward coiling, “relax” it by towing it astern for five or ten minutes, allowing it to shed its internal twists. Flake it on deck to dry. It will be grateful.
Proper Whipping
The weaving, twisting, counter-tensioning inner dynamic of rope has a distinct vulnerability at the bitter end, where the carefully crafted interplay can’t sustain itself and demands support where its continuum ceases: hence, whipping. Whipping not only “ends” your line cleanly but protects it, makes it more docile, and provides a stiffened lead through blocks or fairleads. A full treatment of how to execute a proper whipping will appear in the next installment of Getting Started in Boats.
Halyard Wrench
Nautical etiquette in an anchorage or boatyard is important. One piece of line-work etiquette is the “halyard wrench,” a length of line round-turned about main, mizzen, and jib halyards, holding them away from their mast so the vagrant wind doesn’t hammer out a sleep-spanking rhythm. Tethered to shrouds or stanchions, the halyard wrench (sometimes called a “gilguy”) can be tensioned and hitched against itself with a rolling hitch.
Lashings
The skill of lashing down—dinghy, spar, pole, fuel container, gear—on a pitching, rolling, yawing boat, is an advanced science. We encourage you to begin your education with a few small steps.
Securing Hats and Glasses
Two of the most uncomfortable items to lose overboard are hats and sunglasses. This is an excellent place to practice good line work. You may purchase a manufactured glasses-keeper, of course, but if you notice a crew member without this decoration, lay on a whipping twine keeper: clap on Ashley’s Constrictor Hitch (from the knot-tying tome The Ashley Book of Knots, by Clifford W. Ashley) to the temple pieces ahead of the ears. This aggressive hitch does not give up easily; you may find it simpler to cut it away after your sail. A few passes with a sailmaker’s needle with whipping twine will secure a hat; hitch the other end to a safety pin’s spring-eye and embed the pin more than once through a shirt collar.
Securing the Cabin
We can’t suggest specifics for stowing the gear your guests bring aboard, yet keeping the traffic pattern in the cabin uncluttered, and therefore safe, is essential. There are three working approaches to doing this with cordage: net “hammock” keepers, bungee cord, and small stuff (small-diameter cordage). All can be anchored by pad-eyes to stabilize duffels, backpacks, boat bags, coats, sleeping bags, and insulated hampers. Simple knots such as the round turn, the trucker’s hitch, and the rolling hitch will keep gear high and dry and out of the rush.