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First edition book, fourth edition ankle (4)

First Edition Book, Fourth Edition Ankle

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Here is yours truly, holding a copy of a book I wrote when I was a whole lot younger. The book is a first edition of the Rigger’s Apprentice, first published in 1984. This copy is property of RN extraodinaire Terry Sanchez, who in addition to being a consummate medical professional is an avid sailor, and a world-class fly fisher. You never know who you are going to meet in a hospital.

I was at the hospital for a followup on the installation of my most recent ankle. Yes, they still make parts for these old models, but the first attempt got infected somehow, and had to be removed. The doctors took it out, and stuck a brick spacer in there to hold everything in place while we cleared up the infection, then after several months they took the brick out and put another articulating device in. This time so far, so good. Counting the model that originally came with my left foot, that makes it a fourth edition ankle. The book has also been greatly revised over the years, and I like to think that it and I are co-evolving.

For more on the original surgery, you can visit posts here, listed in order of appearance:

Falling

Scrubs

Purchase

Going Through

The first piece, “Falling,” became the germ of a book of the same title. You can find it Here. The majorly-updated Rigger’s Apprentice, and lots of other items, are available through our Store.

In other news, I am getting semi-mobile now, just in time for our upcoming 3-day Rig Your Boat workshop, happening May 3rd, 4th, and 5th. Only a few spots left, so sign up soon.

 

Grizzly

What’ll You Do If You Meet a Grizzly?

The old Alaska hand was deep in conversation with an eager young backpacker. The old man was clad in canvas, and wore battered-but-serviceable boots. He was lean, hadn’t shaved in a few days, and looked a bit weary, but his eyes were alert. He fairly reeked of genuine backwoods experience.

The young man was clean-cut, almost shiny. He was clad largely in brand-new GoreTex, wore a pair of $600 hiking boots, and had lots of other high-tech gear stuffed inside his carbon-fiber-framed backpack.

The two of them were standing at the rail of one of the vessels of the Alaska Marine Highway. These are basically long-distance ferry boats, that range from Bellingham all the way out to Dutch Harbor. That’s about 3,500 miles worth of overwhelming vistas, dotted by towns, many of which are only reachable by sea or air. If you want to get from Hoonah to Tatitlek, and you don’t happen to have the money to hire a seaplane, you will likely be riding the Highway.

If you are picturing a trip on a cruise liner, you are sadly mistaken. The ships have cabins, but many passengers camp on deck, literally pitching their tents there, using duct tape instead of tent pegs to keep the tents from blowing away. There is a restaurant, but the campers are more likely to be found in the big cafeteria. And there are tourists, but a lot of the passengers are like the old man, just local folks making their way from one town to another, on Alaska’s forbidding coast.

The old man and the young hiker had at at first talked about the mountains and the glaciers they could see from the ship, then about some of the most interesting places to explore on foot, and then on to the fine points of pitching camp, cooking, and staying warm and dry. The old man was a font of sage, practical advice, seasoned with understated adventure stories. As he spoke, other passengers sidled in closer and closer, to catch his words of wisdom.

Eventually he said to the young man, “You’ll be in bear country. What’ll you do if you meet a Grizzly?”

This was not a casual question. Alaska is one of the few remaining places where you can have any expectation of encountering the magnificent Arctos Horribilis. People travel long distances for the chance, and there is a very-well-thought-out infrastructure designed to keep people safe. Attacks are extremely rare, but hikers who are  off by themselves are at an elevated risk of getting into trouble.

“Oh, got that covered,” said the backpacker, “I brought a .357 Magnum.”

“I see. Good pistol that. Powerful. But you’re going to want
to file that front sight down flush with the barrel.”

“File it down?”

“Yup, just file it down right flush and smooth.”

“Why?”

“Well that way it won’t hurt so much when the Grizzly Bear rams it up your ass.”

———————————————————————————————————————–

I have never been aboard those boats, but heard this story from the inimitable Guy Stevens, who witnessed the exchange. You can read another of his stories, about a problematic adventure in maintenance, in my audiobook/ebook Falling, available from Amazon and Apple Books. For those of you who prefer an actual printed copy, complete with signature, contact catalog@briontoss.com.
You can also read lots of other tales, about lots of other people, for free in the archives of my blog, at briontoss.com.

Done properly, a trip to bear country can be an exhilerating and survivable experience. If you are interested in going there, you might want to visit
https://www.nps.gov/articles/bearattacks.htm
(You’ll find links to related articles there, too. ). The photograph at the head of this post appears courtesy of the National Parks Service.

This just in: a link to a wonderfully informative piece on how to behave in bear country. Good writing, lots of useful data, and all the stories have happy endings. See: https://survivalmag.net/bear-safety-guide/

The Highway is in danger of losing much of its funding at the moment, due to dwindling oil revenues, but you can still book a trip: Alaska Marine Highway

2012-09-18 15.02.49 HDR

Letter to a Young Bosun

On the surface, being a bosun is a matter of technical skill. You are expected to know all the knots, seizings, splices, etc., that might be needed in a given vessel, as well as how to apply those structures meaningfully to every rig component. You are expected to have a mental map of the location of every block, shackle, fairlead, and turnbuckle in the rig, every piece of running and standing rigging, on every spar. You are probably also expected to have a similar level of knowledge in hull- and sail-related matters, and to supervise anchoring and mooring exercises, and to be in charge of small boat operations. Plus, as my friend Raven notes, when the going gets tough, and disaster is rapidly unfolding, you are expected to know exactly where the appropriate tool or spare part is, and how to make things right while everyone else is panicking.

Put another way, you, the bosun, must understand the vessel as a series of systems, and to know – viscerally and intellectually –  how they function, how they relate to one another, and how to keep them all in optimal condition. As if that weren’t asking enough, a bosun should also be strong, tough, and agile enough to carry out any and all needed work, and to do so with an unreasonable level of skill. This is a high calling.

The best bosuns realize that there is a lot of theory behind all of the artisanal activity. Vessels are engineered structures, and if you don’t have at least some notion of the basic principles of that engineering, you are just blindly doing handwork. Therefore, while it is important to expand and hone your manual skill set, it is equally important that you study math, particularly geometry. Your rig is an energy-catching machine, and you cannot make meaningful, consistent use of its potential unless you understand the nature and magnitude of the loads that it will bear, and how it makes use of those loads. Acquaint yourself, if you haven’t already done so, with the forces in the rig and hull – tension, compression, torque, shear. Familiarize yourself with righting moments, metacenters, load algorithms, and all the other opaque-at-first technical descriptions which, for the bosun, can be pathways into the beating heart of the rig.  If you can do that, you might, for instance, be able to choose the correct cordage, spar, hardware, etc. for any job, as opposed to cloning a previous mistake. Hmm, a very high calling. But there is even more.

A bosun is also a manager, not just of jobs, but of people. You need to be able to train your crew to do things right. You need to assign jobs commensurate with skill levels, to schedule jobs so that they don’t impede vessel operations – or get in the way of other jobs. And you will need to be able to deal with the crew’s inevitable struggles/recalcitrance/doubts, to monitor the crew without fussing over them, to trust them to do their best, but also to make sure that their best is good enough.

You won’t have time to educate each crewmember in detail, but you must give them at least enough of an outline to kickstart a learning curve. And you must give them enough consistent, compelling evidence of your own competence that they will accept that you know what you are talking about. They must have some reason to believe that what they are being asked to do is best for the boat, even if they don’t understand why.

Next, a bosun works within a financial context, especially in noble-but-impecunious non-profit organizations. Even on well-funded vessels, your ideals will, on a regular basis, come up against a shortage of cash, or time, or both. Prioritizing for safety, sailing efficiency, long-term savings, short-term savings, and good old aesthetics means that you will be juggling considerations every day, in an effort to keep the vessel running. Too many bosuns ignore things until they break, or concentrate solely on the aspects they think they understand best, or get in the habit of putting out fires as a standard working mode. Good bosuns are aware of the the budget as a whole, as well as the rig as a whole, and they do what they can. This involves a certain number of hours of spent staring at the overhead on your off watches, trying to figure out how to hold things together. It also involves a certain level of skill at lobbying the skipper, the mates, and the folks back in the office.

One more important consideration, pretty much unprecedented in the history of bosunry, is the matter of gender. Historically, sailors were almost exclusively men. Not any more. As a result, today’s male bosuns are faced with the challenge of overcoming millennia of cultural conditioning; basically they need to learn how to treat women sailors as though they were, um, sailors. They have it easy. At risk of mansplaining, I will note that this is a more difficult issue for women bosuns, even in the relatively enlightened atmosphere of the sailing community. Women know, a lot better than I, that they are unlikely to get the same level of respect that a male of equal skill would automatically receive. Quite a few vessels have achieved gender parity, or something like it, but I would be remiss not to bring the subject up, as it is one of those things that, like race, sexual preference, etc., can for no good reason affect the safety and well-being of the ship, and of the crew. I asked Julia Briggs, one of our riggers, if she had any advice for women on this topic. She used to work as a commercial diver, and that is one of the most preposterone-heavy vocations on earth. She said that, among other things, it is amazing what a difference it can make if you can offhandedly, seemingly effortlessly, pull off some feat of strength or skill or agility. It doesn’t have to be a superhuman effort, but when people don’t expect you to be able to do anything, you have the opportunity to use obvious ability to shatter their misperceptions.

In conclusion, I would like to deal with a bit of etymological misperception. The word “bosun” is a corruption of “boatswain,” and the word “swain” is generally understood to mean “sweetheart,” or “lover.” Given the irascible, notably non-romantic nature of most of the bosuns I have known, the term might be assumed to be deeply ironic. But “swain” is from the Old Norse, and originally meant “attendant.” Bosuns are, and always have been, deeply committed to their vessels, not as moon-eyed lovers, but as stolid, skeptical  servants of an absurdly demanding master.

The preceding is a much-expanded version of correspondence with Erika McDowell, serving as of this writing as bosun in the brig Lady Washington. Although I have watched, worked with, and at least sometimes admired bosuns for my entire professional career, I have never been one; it is a much bigger set of shoes than I could ever hope to fill. But my particular skill set overlaps with the aloft portion of the bosun’s, hence the  correspondence, and the rigging-heavy slant of what I had to say.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might like to explore my previous blog posts. Warning: some of them have nothing at all to do with sailing, but you might enjoy them anyway.

If you are interested in learning rigging skills, you will find books, videos, classes, and more in our Catalog.

And speaking of being aloft, my most recent book is called Falling, a series of non-fatal stories about the perils of life aloft. You can find the ebook and audiobook through Amazon and Apple. If you would like a printed copy, complete with autograph, write to catalog@briontoss.com, or call 360-385-1080.PS,Shortly after I posted this article, Maggie Ostler, of the barque Picton Castle wrote to tell me about their Bosun School. If you or someone you know aspires to this high calling, this might be a link for you:

https://www.picton-castle.com/bosun-school.html

 

Fair Leads,

Brion Toss

Tas title 2

The Least Likely Festival in the World

         This year I had the great good fortune to journey to Hobart, Tasmania, to give a couple of talks at the biennial Australian Wooden Boat Festival. Courtesy of David Shering and his father John, I had a delightful sail in from nearby Kettering, aboard the 32ft. Hess cutter Ubique. I could tell you about that, or the warmth and vitality of all the people I met, or about the overwhelmingly beautiful array of vessels at the show, but instead I would like to talk about why the event has no business existing.

         See, any sensible festival organizer would choose a topic that has some chance of being interesting to a lot of people, and would stage it in a place that people would, you know, be able to get to. The organizers in Hobart did neither, choosing instead to promote, in an utterly remote location, an interest that lies at the unfortunate intersection of the appallingly archaic, the profoundly impractical, and the ruinously expensive. They might just as reasonably have hosted an antique car festival at the North Pole, or a mental health festival in Florida.

Sure, there are some oddball interests with a small-but-devoted following out there, but location matters. There is a reason that the world’s biggest cheese festival is in Cheshire, England, and that the world’s International Hair Freezing Contest (I am not making this up: https://www.thisisinsider.com/canada-hair-freezing-contest-photos-takhini-hot-springs-2019-2) takes place in the Yukon.

People who care deeply about wooden boats – or who are even aware that they still exist – are very few and far between, so if you have any hope of attracting more than a sliver of this tiny, ultra-specialized audience, you will need to locate the festival as close as possible to the greatest number of zealots. The obvious prime location is Western Europe, where people never throw away old stuff in general, and where the standard of living is sufficiently high that shipwrights can still make a living keeping ahead of the rot.

         Sure enough, if you take a look at Europe’s Atlantic Coast, and find the geographic center of the coasts of the British Isles, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany, and the navigable portions of Scandinavia, you will land more or less at the western end of Brittany.  And that is where, every four years, the Brest/Douarnenez festival happens. It attracts about 715,000 visitors, and about 9,000 sailors, on 1,500 boats, from 25 different countries. Huge, right? But consider, Oktoberfest draws ten times  that many tourists, every year. Even with strategic placement and a spectacular array of boats, the boat festival attracts fewer people than the Polish Woodstock Festival (I am not making this up, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol%27and%27Rock_Festival).

         Okay, now where do you suppose the second-largest wooden boat festival is held? New England, where olde money might be expected to subsidize this manifestation of elegance? Nah, maybe 100 boats in Mystic every year. California, maybe from tech zillionaires chasing the latest fad? In your dreams.

         Okay, how about my beloved Port Townsend, which has held its Wooden Boat Festival every year since 1977? We are home to a fanatically devoted collection of shipwrights, boatbuilding is part of the curriculum at our local high school (https://nwmaritime.org/youth-programs/maritime-discovery-programs-serve-over-200-students-this-spring/ ), and after you graduate you can move on to the grownup’s wooden boatbuilding school just down the road in Hadlock. Boats are deep in our culture. And as if that weren’t enough, Seattle is home to yet more tech zillionaires, as well as other well-to-do, oddball-interest-inclined people. As a result, as many as 40,000 people show up here in September, to see 200 to 300 boats. That’s pretty respectable, all things considered. But, though I am sad to say it, we are in fact a distant third in the Least Likely Festival attendance sweepstakes. The actual second place spot is held by …. Hobart, Tasmania.

         Right, you say, sure you say. As if this tiny island, situated about as far as possible from any other place on earth – except for Australia, which is also situated as far as possible from any other place on earth — is going to draw more than, say, a few hundred locals to a wooden boat event. Right. Sure. But they do. Somehow, every other year, over 200,000 visitors travel a minimum of 700 miles (that’s if you already happen to be in Melbourne) to see about 550 boats, plus innumerable artisans, musicians, toolmakers, authors, educators, and representatives of every other trade even remotely associated with wooden boats, all arrayed along a mile of waterfront in downtown Hobart.

         Clearly this is impossible. But Hobart is a wonderful, magnetic, odd, magnificent place, an outpost of the old British Empire, founded when about half of the Europeans in the area were in penal colonies. Magisterial buildings and medieval-seeming winding streets are overlaid with contemporary technologies and Aussie swagger, to create an environment that is simultaneously formal, rustic, and full of chutzpah. Which is why it is also home to the World’s Least Likely Major Art Museum, the MONA, where a poop-making machine and a musical trampoline vie for attention with an overpowering light show, and a waterfall that spells out live Google searches, alongside more conventional art pieces (https://mona.net.au/museum). Like the boat festival, the MONA should by all rights not exist, and probably neither of them would, anywhere outside of Tasmania. This is Australia’s poorest state, a sort of Outback Appalachia, its logging and mining glory days long in the past. But it is also, well Australian, to a degree that frankly makes the rest of the country look like — forgive me — New Zealand, so it brings a formidable amount of grit and playfulness to every occasion, which tends to attract outrageous outliers like MONA, unlikely-but-burgeoning tech startups, the world’s first Green political movement, and of course the wooden boat festival. In Tasmania, weirdness wins.

 

For more about the festival: https://m.facebook.com/AWBFestival/

With John Shering, (left) aboard Ubique. Photo by David Shering

A parting note: My most recent book, “Falling,” is now available as an ebook and as an audiobook, from Apple as well as Amazon. To get your copies, click Here for Amazon, or visit the ibooks store if you are on a Mac.

If you would like to go old-school and get an actual book, complete with autograph, write to catalog@briontoss.com. Be sure to specify who you would like the book dedicated to.

Larry Pardey Memorial Observatory

The sailors among you will recognize the name Larry Pardey. He and his wife Lin spent decades sailing all over the world, in wooden sailboats that they built — boats without engines. To fund their cruising, they wrote about every aspect of cruising, and of their lives and the lives of the people they met. Their impact was profound, encouraging thousands of people to follow in their footsteps, to varying degrees. And they entertained and educated thousands more who never left shore, because they spoke so beautifully and honestly of the nature of adventure, of exploration, of play, in ways that everyone can relate to.

Their first, and probably most influential book was Cruising in Seraffyn. Now, over 40 years after it was first published, this marvelous book is being offered in a special Tribute Edition, with all proceeds going to the Larry Pardey Memorial Observatory, on Kawau Island, New Zealand. This is something Larry started, equipping it with 4 telescopes and 15 sets of binoculars, so that schoolchildren could come and get an unimpeded look at the night skies.

Larry’s once-vigorous mind has slipped away, but his legacy is vast. Now you can be a part of it, by helping to fund a place that inspires awe and wonder in the minds of thousands of children. And you get a great read in the bargain. To get your copy, visit Pardey Tribute Edition.

“Falling” Format News

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Here is a special announcement, for subscribers to my blog. I wanted all of you to hear it first.

It has taken some time to jump through all the hoops, but you can now listen to yours truly read Falling. I know a lot of you have been waiting for this audiobook version. Thank you for your patience. To get your copy visit Amazon. You can also get the ebook version there.

But wait, as they say, there’s more. We now have a second printing of the paperback version of the book. It is less expensive than the first run — $10 instead of $13 — and it is the only format that can come with an autograph. Order it from Catalog@briontoss.com.

Fair leads,

Brion Toss

 

Padeyes3a

Crossed (Pad)Eyes, The Winner!

It is time to announce the winner of our most recent Rigging Puzzle. But first I’ll mention that if you’d like to see previous puzzles, along with a whole bunch of essays and reports from the field, be sure to visit our Blog. And you might also want to take a look at our Front Page, where, in addition to information on rigging services, you can find details on upcoming events, including our 3-day rigging classes, the Seattle Boat Show, a link to our catalog, and news about an upcoming trip to Tasmania. Okay, on to the Puzzle!

 

Last week’s challenge drew a near-record number of entries, from people in a wide variety of rigging interests. You folks are  obviously enthusiastic about loading up hardware. To see the Puzzle, click HERE.

Because the  Puzzle stipulated manufacturer’s recommendations, we will start with Harken, the maker of the diamond-shaped fixed padeye we used. In their catalog Harken says, “For maximum strength, always align fixed padeye bails to the load.” They then give working strengths and breaking strengths for loads applied at various angles, with the highest strength (1) being a vertical load, and the lowest (3) a horizontal load. This is true for all padeyes and eyebolts, because the fasteners are stronger in tension than in shear, and because no leverage is applied when the load is straight up. The trouble is that the only pertinent illustration for this in the regular Harken catalog is this one:

Too many people, including quite a few Puzzle entrants, seem to think that pulling at point 1 produces the greatest strength, regardless of the plane of the pull. The warning in the catalog text, it seems, is easily overlooked. Harken does have a confusion-eliminating illustration for this issue, but for some reason they only show it in their industrial catalog. Here it is:

In the real world, slightly off-angle loads can be difficult to avoid, but they must be minimized, and the puzzle’s arrangement #1 is definitely bad for fixed padeyes.

Harken also makes a folding padeye, similar to the Wichard model we used for the puzzle, and Harken  takes pains to note that, “Folding padeyes differ from conventional padeyes in that the load should be perpendicular to the hinge and bail instead of in line with it. The strongest positions are with the D-ring vertical or leaning toward the fold-down position, which focuses the load on the side anchored with two screws.”

Harken doesn’t have a comparable illustration for their folding padeyes, but Wichard includes this one with every padeye:

Note that the smiley faces apply whether the bail is angled in either direction; I take this to mean that the difference in strength might not be all that significant, despite Harken’s advice.

The lower right frowny face tells us it is a bad idea to pull in line with the bail on a folding padeye, and this agrees with Harken’s recommendation. The idea here is that you would be applying a point load on one side of the fitting, instead of a long bearing along the length of the hinge. This is the pull shown for the folding padeye in arrangement #2, so that one is out.

Note also that the upper right frowny face calls our attention to the fact that there is a limit on how far the bail can articulate towards the two-fastener side. Go too far, and the bail crunches against the base of the padeye, producing some very unfavorable leverage, torque, and point loading. Therefore, when you are installing folding padeyes, see if there is an articulation limit on one side or the other, and then install it so the side with the greatest range of motion is facing the most likely range of load angles. If you have an application where you might need full articulation in both directions, you need a different padeye. In the first iteration of the Puzzle, I had the bail right down at the base of the padeye in arrangement #3, and sharp-eyed readers Ken Ferrari and Robert Salnick saw this. The second version of the pictures showed the folding padeye on the fully-articulating side, and no one was disqualified because of this detail.

The upshot of all this is that arrangement #1 is good for the folding model, but bad for the diamond, and the opposite is true for arrangement #2. The correct answer, then, is arrangement #3.

Congratulations to all of you who chose #3. And congratulations likewise to everyone who gave it a shot. Our winner, randomly selected from the pool of correct entries, is … Tom Dixon! Congratulations, Tom. Let me know which version of Falling you would like to receive — print, audio, or ebook — and what circumference and rope diameter soft shackle you would prefer. For everyone else, thanks for all of your thoughtful responses.

If you didn’t win the drawing, but want a copy of that book, it is available from Amazon as well as iBooks. If you would like an autographed print copy, be in touch with Sue at our shop, by writing to catalog@briontoss.com.

 

 

Padeyes1a

The Rigging Puzzle: Crossed (Pad)Eyes

There’s lots going on at briontoss.com. Scroll to the bottom of this page for details.

The Rigging Puzzle this time is about padeyes, and how to load them. In the pictures below, one padeye is a classic diamond pattern from Harken, and the other is one of Wichard’s nifty folding models.  We loaded them three different ways, all with the leads rising slightly up from the horizontal, and only one of those ways complies with the manufacturers’ recommendations for maximum strength, for both padeyes.  So what’ll it be, picture number 1, picture number 2, or picture number 3?

If you think you know the answer, send it to puzzle@briontoss.com, or reply at the bottom of this page. Feel free to kick this around online, but it won’t count unless you submit an answer. We’ll draw the winner randomly from the pool of correct answers.

The prizes this time: one of our high-strength Spectra soft shackles (suitable for securing to your favorite padeye) and a copy of my book Falling, about the perils and rewards of working aloft. The book is available as a paperback, as an ebook, or as an audiobook, the latter narrated by yours truly.

Entries must be here by noon Pacific Time, January 21st. We will announce the winner on January 23rd. Good luck!

Arrangement 1, top view

Arrangement 1, side view

 

 

 

Arrangement 2, top view

Arrangement 2, side view

 

 

Arrangement 3, top view

Arrangement 3, side view

 

In other news, if you are going to be at the Seattle Boat Show, I’ll be giving a series of talks there about various aspects of rigging. And I will soon be sending reports in from, of all places, Tasmania, at their huge, semi-annual Australian Wooden Boat Show. And finally, we will be once again bowing to popular demand and will be giving another 3-Day Rigging Workshop this April, at our loft in Port Townsend. Still some spaces available, but these workshops fill up fast. For information on all of this, and more, visit briontoss.com

 

 

Sweating still

Sweating the Fall Things, the Winners!

 

In our most recent puzzle, we asked how much additional tension our rigger Julia Briggs could apply to a line by “sweating” it sideways. Here is the  puzzle, with accompanying video:

Sailors and other rope users are familiar with the process of sweating or swigging up a line: pulling sharply sideways on the fall of a purchase, above the belay point to gain a bit of slack, then quickly transitioning to a downward resolution, so that slack can be taken up at the belay point. The combination of leverage and impact-loading allows you to get more tension than you could by simply pulling down on the line. But the question is: how much more?

In the video below our rigger Julia Briggs is sweating a line in our shop. The line has been set to a starting tension of 200lbs.

Julia weighs 140 lbs.

The line is attached to a load cell that has been set up to read the maximum tension achieved.

So here is the puzzle: how many additional pounds of tension did Julia impose?

Congratulations to everyone who ventured an answer; there was some serious head-scratching going on out there. But the people who got closest to the actual answer tended to be the ones who used actual math, so to explain things, here is a simple-enough-for-my-level-of-comprehension explanation:

The maximum reading on that load cell was the result of two factors: how much force Julia could exert; and the angle that the rope formed at the peak of her pull.

Because she pulled very sharply, she exerted a shock load (accelerated load), which could easily be at least as much as her body weight, depending on how fast she was moving, how elastic the materials were, and how far she managed to deflect the line. For details on calculating shock loads here is a good site: sciencing.com/calculate-shock-load

As you can see from the video, Julia did not deflect the line more than a few inches, but this is actually a good thing in terms of getting a high load cell reading, because her leverage increases as the angle decreases, varying with the sine of the angle formed at either end of the line. If this sounds counterintuitive, there are lots of real-world applications for the idea. For instance, if you are a guitarist, you know how easy it is to “bend” a note up, tightening an already tight string by pushing sideways on it as you pluck it. Now try to get the same effect by pulling in line with the string (without using the lever known as a tuning peg), and you will see how powerful your leverage was. If you are a sailor, you know that as shroud angles diminish, tension on the shrouds goes up. And if you are an industrial rigger, you know that loads on sling legs go up as sling angles decrease towards the horizontal. For more on this, see the “Standing Rigging Design and Materials” chapter of  The Rigger’s Apprentice.

In our example, we started with an initial tension of 200 pounds, minimizing the ultimate deflection, and thus maximizing the potential leverage. Then Julia maximized the effect of her weight with the classic sailor’s Two-six-HEAVE, technique, building up her acceleration to an explosive final pull. And she maximized the shock load with good body mechanics, so that she was pulling perpendicular to the line, arms fully-extended and braced, on that final pull. The result was a load of 563 pounds (!), after deducting the initial 200 pounds. That’s right, she exerted almost four times her body weight on that line. In the real world, we are usually working with more elastic materials and bigger deflections, but you can see why sweating a line can be such a valuable force multiplier.

Given all the variables, it is not surprising that the answers were all over the place, and no one got within 10 pounds of the result, but several of you were quite close, so I expanded the tolerances, and am awarding prizes to everyone who got within 150 pounds, high or low. So congratulations to Nels  Backstom (672 pounds), Ian Duff (420 pounds), a reader identified only as “nopain” (480 pounds), CarlyP (670 pounds), Captain Mike (whose entry was closest, at 600 pounds), my dear friend Ben Stockwell (644 pounds), and Seng (715 pounds, which is 2 pounds over, but what the heck). All of you folks, please be in touch to let me know whether you want the audiobook or the ebook version, and whether it should go to you, or to be a gift.

For those of you who were outside the envelope, it is really easy to get a copy of Falling by other means, by going to Apple or Amazon.

In other news, those in the Seattle area can find me at the Seattle  Boat Show later this month, giving a series of talks about a variety of rigging topics. After that, I’ll be heading to Tasmania for some talks at the wonderful Australian Wooden Boat Show.

Fair leads,

Brion Toss

Sweating still

Sweating the Fall Things, a Rigging Puzzle

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Sailors and other rope users are familiar with the process of sweating or swigging up a line: pulling sharply sideways on the fall of a purchase, above the belay point to gain a bit of slack, then quickly transitioning to a downward resolution, so that slack can be taken up at the belay point. The combination of leverage and impact-loading allows you to get more tension than you could by simply pulling down on the line. But the question is: how much more?

In the video below our rigger Julia Briggs is sweating a line in our shop. The line has been set to a starting tension of 200lbs.

Julia weighs 140 lbs.

The line is attached to a load cell that has been set up to read the maximum tension achieved.

So here is the puzzle: how many additional pounds of tension did Julia impose?

Note that Julia makes no effort to take the slack towards the floor; we just wanted to see how much extra tension could be gained. If you have some idea about the result, send it to puzzle@briontoss.com, or write it in the comments section below. Anyone whose guess is within 150 pounds of the actual answer will win a free copy of my new book, Falling, a series of stories about working at heights. You get your choice of an ebook or audiobook version.

Puzzle entry deadline is noon Pacific time, January 5th, 2019, and the winners will be announced on January 7th. Good luck!

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