This week you have two chances to win our Puzzle drawing. First way:
Name at least two running rig components that, in normal use, can have a distinct effect on helm balance (inducing or reducing weather helm).
Second way: name at least one running rig component that, in normal use, can not have a distinct effect on helm balance.
List as many answers as you like, with as much explanation as you like. Incorrect answers will not be counted against you. Correct entries in either category will be eligible for a random drawing for a Fabulous Prize. Send your answers to puzzle@briontoss.com. We will draw the winners at noon Pacific time, February 5th. Winners will be announced February 7th.
Last week we saw how to inflict thousands of dollars of damage to a pristine Hinckley yawl, using nothing but a bit of chain. For more on this, see last week’s blog, The Delivery, part 1. And now we carry on to the rest of the disaster. We have left the scene of the damage, and are approaching our home dock.
Pause to look at this dock. There are no boats moored nearby, no obstacles of any kind. It is a wide U-shape, with the bottom of the U parallel to the shore. It is also parallel to the wind today. This means that, as we approach the dock, the wind is blowing directly onto our bow. There is room enough on all three sides for our boat. We could motor up to the far end, turn to port, and the wind would assist us by blowing us gently down onto the dock, port-side-to. Alternatively, we could just get in close to the long side, and with a little port helm at the last minute, the wind would help us land. Sam assessed things as we approached the dock, and gunned it for the near side.
By this point, full of righteous disgust, I am only too eager to get the hell off this wreck. I see what is coming, but I go forward with a mooring line, determined to get that line ashore. As per his established modus operandi, Sam angles in towards the dock at flank speed, then cuts power at the last second. At which point the boat begins slowing down, and the effects of the wind on our starboard beam quickly outweigh our diminishing inertia, blowing us away from the dock. But we are so close, just a few feet away, so I jump. And slip on the lovely varnished rail. I land, half on the dock, half in the water, but I have the mooring line triumphantly grasped in my hand. Before I can get it onto the cleat, though, I hear the all-too-familiar sound of the Hinckley’s engine revving up to full throttle, and see, out of the corner of my eye, that the hull is moving astern, accelerating rapidly. In an instant I am yanked violently off the dock, because the mooring line is tangled around my body. Of course. The boat continues at flank speed astern, towing me planing into Blue Hill Bay. Unable to free myself from the loaded line, I reach back, grab my trusty sheath knife, and begin sawing away on the line. And stop, realizing that, even if I cut myself free, I will almost certainly die of hypothermia before I can get back to the dock, assuming Sam doesn’t run me over first.
Fortunately, just then Sam reverts to idle mode. Actually takes it out of gear, then runs to the bow, where he stands mute, literally wringing his hands. I pull myself along the mooring line towards the nearest side of the boat, which happens to be the starboard side, where the lifelines are still intact. In the cold, cold water, everything is simultaneously slowing down and taking on a surreal clarity. Eventually I reach the boat, and try to pull myself up to deck on the line, at the bow. No go. I just don’t have the strength. “Help me,” I said. So Sam reaches over the lifelines, grabs me by the back of my jacket collar, and pulls up. This acts primarily to strangle me with my own jacket, but doesn’t get me much further out of the water. Spots appear before my eyes. I can’t breathe, can’t even say, “Let go.” And then, just as I am about to lose consciousness, he says, “I can’t hold on,” and drops me. On the way down I bang my head on the rail, and then I am underwater, utterly detached, looking up at the light, giving serious thought to the option of dying, deciding against it.
I surface, look at Sam, look at the boat, and notice that the boat’s drift has brought me closer to the starboard lifeline gate, which is open. Swimming to it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but when I get there, Sam has no choice but to grab me down at deck level, and the two of us are able to haul me aboard. A quick radio call, and half a dozen yard crew run down to the dock to catch lines. They hustle me to a hot shower, where I stay until the water begins to turn cold. I understand now that this is not an optimal treatment for hypothermia, but oh, it feels so good.
Later that day, I ask Sam why he had backed up. He explains that he had seen me land partly in the water, and was concerned that I might be crushed by the hull. Now, at the time, the hull was being blown smartly away from me and the dock. And if it hadn’t been, then the hull would have smeared me along the length of the dock. But it was a nice gesture.
That evening as I huddle by a fire, still trying to get warm, a fellow with a schooner phones me up, and says he is in need of a gang of rigging. I phone in my resignation to the yard the next morning, and I’ve been out of a job ever since.
Last week we posted a Long-John-Silver-ized version of a classic puzzle. Here’s how it went:
Captain Montgomery Hall, the famous pirate, was getting ready to retire, and wanted to be sure he had a qualified successor, so one morning he came on deck with three buckets, their tops covered. As the crew watched he hoisted each of them overhead on separate halyards.
“To be a captain,” he said, “Ye have to be smart. Who amongst ye is the smartest?”
The pirates conferred a bit, and then pushed forward their reluctant choice.
“All right, we’ll see how smart ye are. There’s a gold doubloon in one a’them buckets. There’s a piece of stale, weevily bread in the other two. Pick the right bucket, and you get the doubloon, and the command. Pick the wrong one, ye get yer usual breakfast.”
“But captain,” said the sailor, “No matter how smart I might be, I could only pick the right bucket by luck.”
“Just by sayin’ that, it shows that at least ye aren’t stupid. But pick one anyway.”
So the sailor chose one of the buckets, walked over to the pin its halyard was on, and prepared to cast off.
“Wait just a minute,” said the captain, “Let’s make this more interesting.” And he went over to one of the other pins, lowered one of the other buckets to deck, and removed its cover. Inside was a piece of stale, weevily bread.
“This means that the doubloon is either in the bucket ye chose, or in the third bucket,” said the captain. Could be either one, right?”
“Ye-e-ss,” said the sailor thoughtfully.
“I’ll let ye change your mind, if ye want,” said the captain.
After the sailor considered the matter for a while, he walked away from his first choice, and lowered the third bucket to deck.
So here is the puzzle: Was this the smart thing to do? By changing his mind, did the sailor improve his chances, or make them worse, or did they stay the same?
The solution is tricky, which is why, for this puzzle, any answer right or wrong qualified entrants for the prize drawing. And the winner of that drawing is…. my dear old friend Jim Cole who, along with his spouse Barbara have been cruising the South Pacific recently. Jim is an actual rocket scientist, but even his answer wasn’t quite correct. But as promised, here is my utterly subjective choice for best explanation, courtesy of Jerry Andrews, who wrote:
“The best choice (by a factor of 2) is to pick the OTHER bucket. When the pirate picks a bucket, he has a 1 in 3 chance o’ bein’ right, and a 2 in 3 chance o’ bein’ wrong. Now the captain knows which bucket bears the doubloon, so he’ll always lower a bucket with weevily bread—he’ll never choose the bucket with the doubloon, whether the pirate picked it not. Since the captain’s choice isn’t random, the odds that the pirate is wrong haven’t changed—they’re still 2 in 3. By changing his choice, he’s doubled his chance o’ bein’ right, and becomin’ captain himself. By stickin’ with his original choice, he [would’ve] proved he’s a regular pirate himself, and may not be bright enough to be captain. On the other hand, it’s usually better to be lucky than good, so maybe he’ll win the job anyway.”
I liked this answer because it was about as concise as possible, as well as being expressed in piratical patois. Jerry, Jim, you are hereby awarded a genuine Rigger’s Apprentice T-shirt. Let me know your sizes and mailing addresses and we will get them shipped.
By the way, the first version of this puzzle was published by Joseph Bertrand in 1889, and people have been arguing about it ever since. It is best-known today as the Monty Hall Puzzle (hence the name of the pirate captain). There is a considerable body of commentary around the puzzle, with my favorite being that spurred by Marilyn Vos Savant’s version in Parade magazine, back in 1990. You can read one account of this here: http://www.stayorswitch.com/history.html.
The problem is that the correct answer is so deeply counterintuitive that most non-experts — and even many experts
— refuse to believe the answer, even when it has been carefully explained.
We’ll be posting a helm balance puzzle in a week, so be sure to check in. If you would like to be notified when we post a puzzle or article, you can subscribe at the bottom of this post, or any of my other posts.
For about forty years now, I’ve been rigging. But in all that time I’ve only had one job, and that for just two days. By “job” I mean employed as part of a crew in someone else’s shop; all the rest of the time, out of obstinacy and/or ignorance, I’ve either worked by myself or hired my own crews. But one Winter, early on, I was out of work, out of money, and decided to sign on with a boatyard on Mount Desert Island, on the coast of Maine.
It was late March, and the yard was beginning to prep clients’ yachts for the brief, sweet sailing season Downeast. As the new guy, I was outranked by everyone else, and was paired with a relative veteran, who had been there for about two weeks. As I soon discovered, those two weeks comprised nearly all of his experience on the water. The first day we spent sorting and checking rigging on masts that were soon to be stepped. It was easy work.
On day two we were tasked with taking an inflatable about a mile to a sheltered little harbor, there to pick up a gorgeous Hinckley yawl. When we got to the inflatable my partner –we’ll call him Sam – claimed seniority, and took the helm. That was fine, but he soon displayed a peculiar driving style: he would gun the engine full throttle until he was about to run into something. Then he would throttle down to an idle, carefully make a course correction, and then gun it again. Full screaming throttle. Idle. Repeat. This went on until we idled up to our delivery.
The boat had just come through a complete overhaul. The rigging and mast were new, the plumbing, generator, and engine had been completely upgraded. So had the navigation gear. And the hull was a gorgeous, perfectly fair, utterly polished, midnight blue work of art. Since it was clear that Sam was not exactly a skilled driver, and especially because there was a bit of a breeze blowing directly into the harbor, I presumed to offer to drive the boat back to the yard.
“Uh-uh,” said Sam, “I’ll take it.”
A brief aside here. In the code of protocol among American males, Who Gets to Drive has historically played a dominant role. Riding Shotgun, while not without honor, is distinctly subsidiary, and only the implication that a firearm is involved makes it acceptable. I had deferred to Sam in the matter of the dinghy, because seniority is a powerful component of the same code. But it was clear that Sam knew essentially nothing about driving a boat, and that the one he now had the keys to was much larger, much more difficult to maneuver, and, especially much more expensive than what he had barely managed to arrive in. But, after a moment’s hesitation, I deferred to him, and set about dealing with fenders and mooring lines as he got under way.
It is important now to picture the harbor. It was a tiny little pocket of a thing, with the dock at its leeward end. The wind was beam-on to us as we left the dock. The harbor was crowded with boats (a mix of pleasure craft and fishing vessels), all on moorings. The shores were steep-to, with moorings right up to them. This meant that anyone leaving the dock had to turn smartly into the wind to get started, and then snake through a mooring field to get clear. Not a major feat for an experienced driver, but Sam wasn’t experienced. Sure enough, as soon as the lines were cast off he cranked the big wheel over, and, with the engine at idle, scraped his way off the dock. I was immediately and aerobically occupied with a roving fender, trying to preserve the gelcoat. Eventually we got clear, with the bow pointed out, at which point Sam opened the throttle all the way.
The trouble was all those other boats; they formed an overlapping barrier to our exit, several ranks deep, so that just as we got some serious way on we were in danger of ramming somebody. And sure enough, whenever a collision was imminent, Sam would drop the revs back to idle and crank the wheel over, looking for a lane. More running about with the fender, and a couple of bumps, but we got past the first rank. At which point Sam again gunned it, and again got us up to a fairly scary velocity, on a fairly collision-assured vector. By this time people on some of the other boats were beginning to shout, and to bring out fenders of their own. People on shore were beginning to come out of workshops and houses, to join in the shouting, to wave their arms, or just to stare in wonder. In brief respites between collisions, I shrugged dramatically, as if to say, “It’s not my fault.” This appeased no one.
We conducted a high-stakes game of pinball for the next few minutes, miraculously inflicting only cosmetic damage to our own boat or those of others. Several times I had the urge to drop my fender and force Sam away from the wheel. And several times I stayed with the fender. I am not proud of this; in the course of subsequent years I have concluded that many of the ills of the world are due to competent people who, out of a misplaced sense of etiquette, let incompetent people drive, in the various meanings of that term.
Anyway, there was at last only one mooring between us and freedom. On it was a Nova Scotia-built lobster boat, about thirty-five feet. It was not new, but it was handsome, and well-cared-for. It was on our port side. Two men that I took to be the crew stood on shore not far away, hands on hips. Sam narrowly missed a boat to starboard, but in doing so he pointed us right at the Novi boat. And gunned it. Much shouting, from shore, from other boats, and from me. Sam went to idle, turned sharply to port, and just cleared the bow of the lobster boat – but fouled on the mooring chain. At this point a combination of vessel inertia and wind, aided by a desperate mash on the accelerator, caused our lovely yawl to scrape its entire port side against that chain. I remember watching as the chain tore out all the port lifelines, and all of their stanchions, and exploded all the big round fenders that were hanging there. The sound of thousands of dollars of gelcoat being ground away was an apocalyptic accompaniment.
Suddenly we were in the clear. There was a lot of shouting and fist-shaking still going on, but the worst was over. Maybe a bit patronizingly I said, “How about if I drive?”. And to his credit, Sam said, “I screwed up, but I might as well take it the rest of the way. Besides, it should be easy now.”
There was something alarming about that last sentence, but once again I deferred, and we continued towards the dock that was our destination.
Captain Montgomery Hall, the famous pirate, was getting ready to retire, and wanted to be sure he had a qualified successor, so one morning he came on deck with three buckets, their tops covered. As the crew watched he hoisted each of them overhead on separate halyards.
“To be a captain,” he said, “Ye have to be smart. Who amongst ye is the smartest?”
The pirates conferred a bit, and then pushed forward their reluctant choice.
“All right, we’ll see how smart ye are. There’s a gold doubloon in one a’them buckets. There’s a piece of stale, weevily bread in the other two. Pick the right bucket, and you get the doubloon, and the command. Pick the wrong one, ye get yer usual breakfast.”
“But captain,” said the sailor, “No matter how smart I might be, I could only pick the right bucket by luck.”
“Just by sayin’ that, it shows that at least ye aren’t stupid. But pick one anyway.”
So the sailor chose one of the buckets, walked over to the pin its halyard was on, and prepared to cast off.
“Wait just a minute,” said the captain, “Let’s make this more interesting.” And he went over to one of the other pins, lowered one of the other buckets to deck, and removed its cover. Inside was a piece of stale, weevily bread.
“This means that the doubloon is either in the bucket ye chose, or in the third bucket,” said the captain. Could be either one, right?”
“Ye-e-ss,” said the sailor thoughtfully.
“I’ll let ye change your mind, if ye want,” said the captain.
After the sailor considered the matter for a while, he walked away from his first choice, and lowered the third bucket to deck.
So here is the puzzle: Was this the smart thing to do? By changing his mind, did the sailor improve his chances, or make them worse, or did they stay the same?
If you think you know the answer, send it to puzzle@briontoss.com. Give a reason for your choice. Even if your answer isn’t correct, your courage alone qualifies for a drawing for a Rigger’s Apprentice T-shirt. There will be a bonus prize for the best explanation of the correct answer. Entries must be submitted by noon, Pacific Time, January 22nd. We will announce the winners on January 24th.
Last week we showed you two knots, but asked you to name four. That’s because knots are partly about topography, partly about where the ends are. A classic example is that the Sheet Bend and the Bowline are identical in terms of topography, but one is a loop, one is a bend, and if you don’t make that distinction, bad things can happen in terms of how the structure is loaded.
In this Puzzle, we started with the picture at the top of this post. The upper one looks like a Square Knot, but it could also be what is known as a Thief Knot, thus:
The structure is the same, but the ends are on the same side of the standing parts with the Reef Knot, and diagonally opposed for the Thief Knot. As dear Mr. Ashley tells its story, “There is a legend that sailors tie clothesbags, and bread bags with this knot, and that thieves always retie them with reef knots and so are inevitably detected. It is a pleasing story that should encourage honesty. However, if I have ever met this knot in practical use, I have neither recognized it nor paid penalty for my failure to do so.”
An even more obscure pair of knots are the two that share the structure of the lower knot at the top of this post. If you were to pull back on that picture, you would either get the Granny Knot or the Whatknot. Neither of these knots are to be recommended for general use, but Ashley notes that, with the ends arranged in one way, the Whatknot is the least secure bend in the world. Pull on the standing parts, and the knot just crawls out of the rope. But flip the ends past each other, and it miraculously becomes one of the most secure bends in the world. You can see details on this, as well as how to turn this phenomenon into a really mean knot prank, in the ABK, #2579. Here is what the two not-quite-twins look like:
I will take this opportunity to note that the Whatknot’s bipolar behavior is only an extreme example of a common issue; many knots’ reliability is entirely dependent, not just on how they are tied, but how they are drawn up, and how their ends are disposed.
Of the entries that got two of the knots right, the winner is Allan Jaenecke, who wins his choice of any of our DVD’s.
No one guessed correctly on three of the possible answers, but from the pool of got-’em-all entries, the winner is John D. Rae who runs the Marlinespike Sailor’s Guild page on Facebook. I am particularly pleased that John’s name got picked, as it makes it easy for me to give his site a plug. Go there, join that group. Oh, and John also introduced me to a new name for the Whatknot: the Grief Knot. This is a portmanteau of “Grief” and “Granny.” Makes for a catchy couplet (see title).
As always, the winners are welcome to trade their prizes in on other items in our catalog. Also as always I encourage readers to submit candidates for future Puzzles. So far no one has…
Until now I’ve been tacking the Puzzle onto the end of each blog entry, but in future it will have its own space. Next Wednesday, watch for a particularly tough puzzle about the difficult choice made by a pirate with aspirations to captaincy.
This is the last of a series of articles about my left ankle. To see other entries in the series, scroll down in the blog to see the “Ankle” entries. The first one is “Falling.” If you are just here for the Puzzle, you will find it at the end of this article.
From lifelong conditioning, when I think of surgeries, I think of masked and gloved figures, muttering the names of specialized utensils as they huddle around a sleeping patient. In the background there is an assortment of beeping, hissing machinery. A mercilessly bright overhead light throws everything into a literally sterile relief.
This is still a valid image, as far as it goes, but for many contemporary surgeries, including the ankle replacement that I recently underwent, my mental image has been missing a crucial component: a machine shop. We are talking drill press, plunge router, oscillating saw, the works, plus an assortment of jigs, clamps, and drivers that any shipwright might envy. All of these things have been loaded into operating theaters, thanks to the engineers and surgeons who have come up with tools, techniques, and parts to meet a powerful demand for aftermarket joint repairs and upgrades. We are talking actual joinery here, at a level of refinement that one would expect to find at a Port Townsend shipyard, but with scrubs instead of Carhart’s.
I was recently the beneficiary of this machinery, courtesy of the UW Ankle Clinic in Seattle. What follows is an interested layperson’s look at the technology.
I’ll start by saying that total knee and hip replacements are now so common that they almost seem mandatory for Baby Boomers; according to the Mayo Clinic, over a million hips and knees are installed every year. Prosthetic ankles, though, are still something of a rarity (fewer than 5,000 per year), as a relatively small surface area and relatively high, complex stresses have until recently made it a challenge to produce durable joints. Because of this, surgeons used to install ankles grudgingly, and only if they could be assured that you were a particularly lethargic couch potato, preferably of an advanced age, so there would be little chance that you might actually use your new ankle for anything more strenuous than toe-tapping.
But hardware design has evolved at a steady pace (meaning that engineers learned from catastrophic design failures), and surgeons have now had opportunity to hone their skills (meaning they have learned from catastrophic technique failures), so total ankle arthroplasty (meaning, well, you’ll see) is now an option for even relatively active old farts such as myself.
Contemporary prosthetic joints aren’t much to look at (figures 1 through 3) – just a pair of curved metal pieces, with polymer liners – but their precise configuration, including the transverse tenons across their backs, their exact curves, and the pitted surface texture, all serve to make the joint more functional and durable. This joint is the work of Zimmer-Biomet, and as you will see, the artfulness of the joint’s design is just one of the things they do well.
About that texture: In the process of healing, new bone will grow into the surface, creating a solid bond. The FDA requires that adhesive also be injected into some of the gaps between bone and hardware, and my surgeons complied with this requirement, but with a distinct air of amused tolerance for a pointless government mandate. Their belief is that porosity alone makes glue needlessly redundant. On the one hand I can understand their confidence that bone and steel will become inextricably interlinked. On the other hand, this is definitely a place where I appreciate the presence of a belt as well as suspenders, and I would not object to staples, throughbolts, and Velcro too, if it made the joint more durable.
As you can see, the pieces of this new joint are elegantly shaped, but they aren’t particularly complex pieces of work; the real challenge is how to install them into a living human being, and that is where the machine shop comes in.
The first machine shop component is a sort of jig, into which the patient’s leg and foot are clamped (figure 4). Well, not just clamped; the tibia is actually screwed to one of the longitudinal members of the jig. With the work fixed in place, the surgeons get to do a little old-school work, making a long incision, and pulling the two sides of the incision apart like a set of theater curtains. I will not show you what that looks like, given how squeamish some people have been about the relatively pleasant appearance of the X-rays and skeletal images shown here.
The surgeons approach the work from the outboard side. This gives the best option for machining, and gives blood vessels and nerve bundles a relatively wide berth. The fibula (the smaller of the two lower leg bones, located on the outboard side of your leg) is in the way, so the next step is to sever it a short distance above the ankle (figure 5), and then fold it down out of the way, to allow access to the ankle joint. I added those italics because, ignorant of the details of surgical procedures as I was/am, I’d never thought that the work could be so mechanical. Literally mechanical, like how you would pull a clevis pin to get at a winch’s gear cluster, or cut a hole in a ship’s hull or deck to replace an engine.
With the fibula out of the way, a drilling/milling jig on guide bars is slid into place next to the foot, and a series of holes is drilled on the talar (lower) and tibial (upper) sides of the ankle joint (figure 6). These holes are laid out on a centroid curve (relative to the ankle’s anatomic center of rotation). In other words, we are preparing a path that mimics the original joint’s path of travel. These holes are then enlarged, using a larger drill bit in the same jig, a process that will be familiar to any shipwright or machinist. The smaller drill bits allow precise arcs, and the larger bits remove most of the bone between the holes.
The drill bit is then replaced with a milling bit, and the remaining material in drilled area is milled away (7), leaving an arced slot where the ankle joint used to be. The depth of the drilled and milled holes is carefully set. I have done this with a piece of tape wrapped around the shaft of the bit, as a visual do-not-exceed depth mark. The surgeons probably used something fussier…
Once the slot is made, more milling ensues, creating transverse mortises to accommodate the prosthetic’s tenons, plus channels into which adhesive can be pumped. When all is fair, the hardware is inserted (figure 8).
Once the hardware is in, it is time for reassembly, starting with flipping that fibula back into place, then screwing a sister frame alongside, to reinforce the joint (figure 9). Hardware taken care of, the rest of the operation is a matter of easing that flesh curtain back into place, and stitching the sides together. This is a reversion to traditional surgery, using actual needles and thread, but even here there is some degree of innovation. Specifically, the stitches that surgeons use to close wounds have changed, with some variation on a “Mattress Stitch” favored, as it provides a smoother, stronger closure than previous configurations (figure 10).
As of this writing, the stitches have been removed, and the incision is almost entirely healed, but it will be another month or so before I can put more than half my body weight on the new ankle; it takes time for bone to grow into that pumice-like surface, time for the fibula to mend, time for circulation and nerve function to return to normal. Basically I’ve spent most of the last six weeks supine, with foot elevated, trying not to go batty from inactivity. But while my conscious mind has been restless, the deeper parts of me have been stolidly, unceasingly, molecule-by-molecule repairing a relatively serious wound. The parts of me that are doing the work don’t know that this was careful surgery, done for my improvement. All they know is that I have suffered an injury, and they have marshaled all of my body’s resources to address that injury, working with a precision and skill that makes the surgeons – as I am sure they would readily admit – look like somewhat dim apprentices.
Note: The X-rays in this piece are of my ankle. Unless otherwise noted, the illustrations are from Zimmer, the manufacturers of the hardware, and of the machinery used to install it. For a much more detailed description of the procedure, see – http://www.zimmer.com/content/dam/zimmer-web/documents/en-US/pdf/surgical-techniques/foot-and-ankle/zimmer-trabecular-metal-total-ankle-surgical-technique.pdf. Many thanks to Dr. Sangeorzan and the entire team of careful, competent, friendly people who made it all happen.
And now for this week’s Fabulous Puzzle. In the picture below are what appear to be two knots, but since you can’t see the ends, a quirk of topology means that there might be any of four knots represented. All of the knots are bends (knots which join two ropes together), so there is an end and a standing part on each side of each knot.
If you can identify two of the possible knots, your entry will qualify you for a drawing to win one of our DVD’s.
If you can identify three of the possible knots, your entry will qualify you for a drawing to win one of our Point Hudson Fids, good for up to 5/8″ rope.
And if you can identify all four possible knots, you will qualify you for a drawing to win a personalized autographed copy of the new edition of the Rigger’s Apprentice.
If you win, and already own any or all of the above prizes, we will work out a prize of equivalent value for you.
To see these items and more, visit our online store, on this site.
As always, we welcome any and all additional rope geek information on the names, characteristics, history, etc. of the puzzle topics. We also welcome suggestions for future puzzles!
Send your entries to puzzle@briontoss.com before noon on the 10th of January. We will draw random winners from the pool of correct entries, and announce them on Friday, the 12th of January.