Marlingspike skills have so many ways of being expressed. Here are two of my favorite recent examples, and one … not so much.

First, the picture above shows a hatchet-hitching masterpiece from the incomparable Lauren Dixon. That’s Moku hitching up by the head, then a Turk’s Head, then a lovely 18-strand round sinnet. All in copper wire (which she twisted into 3-strand “twine”) and ribbon, with the bottom of the sinnet secured with copper tacks. An amazing piece, that Lauren made for her sweetie. Oh, and you can’t see it, but she built a compartment into the base of the handle, to store a file, to sharpen with, and a fire-starting flint. So you can sharpen the hatchet, then use it to chop kindling, so you can light a fire, so you have enough light to admire the hitching on the hatchet. I think that Lauren could be talked into taking commissions for work like this. If you are interested, let me know, and I will put you in touch with her. An artist like this deserves recognition.

Next, here are the stages in making a 1×19 wire splice. First we have the served eye in the vise, with two tucks made with each of the six strands, with each strand having three yarns. The eye is oversized to allow removal of the thimble for inspection, maintenance, or repair. The thimble is from the good folks at Port Townsend Foundry.

Next, we leave one yarn out of each bundle, and tuck the remaining yarns twice more.

Then we drop out one of the two remaining yarns in each bundle, and tuck twice more.

When the splice has been faired, we twist the strands to break them off, in an artful and mysterious fashion that causes them to break with a little hook at the end, to resist coming untucked, but said hooks are flush with the surface, so they don’t gouge adjacent things or people.

With the tucking done, it remains to parcel and serve the splice. Really an optional step, but it does prettify things. The end of the service acts as a seizing to secure the thimble. You will soon find this splice at one end of the forestay of the beautiful Rhodes sloop Varya.

If you would like to learn how to splice 1×19 — or 7x constructions — I can honestly recommend The Rigger’s Apprentice. It is available at our store, complete with autograph, and also at retail stores and sites.

Our last bit of handwork is, sadly, of the non-lovely type. Here on the Salish Sea, we have a lot of ferry traffic. When the ferry is in its slip, the captain keeps it in gear, keeping it pushed against the dock as cars and foot-passengers board and depart. As a prudent backup, the deck crew secures two stout mooring lines from shore, so that even in the event of an engine or transmission failure, the boat won’t drift away from the dock, and people and cars won’t drop into the water. As it happens, engine and transmission failures, though rare, do happen. In my experience, most deckhands take this job seriously, snugging the lines before belaying, and then making enough turns on the cleat to keep the ferry put, should something fail. But some of them are less, um, conscientious:

Zoom in on that belay. Do you think it has a chance of holding, if need be? And this is not the worst example I have seen. For several years I forwarded pictures like this, first to the ferries administration, and then to the Coast Guard. I even forwarded stills and videos of deckhands casting off mooring lines while cars were still loading or unloading. The Coast Guard finally stepped in and put a stop to this behavior, and for a while all was well. But lately these scary non-belays have begun creeping back in. So I am asking for help. If you ride a ferry around the Sound, check those belays as you board and depart. If you don’t like what you see, get a picture, and send it to me. Alternatively, you could contact the Marine Inspection Office directly: john.d.dwyer@uscg.mil.

In book news, my ebook Falling is about to become an audiobook, too. I will let you know when that happens. Apple and Amazon will both carry it.

Meanwhile if an ebook is more your style, you can get one right now. Perhaps as last-minute gifts for the adventurers in your life?

A little further out, we made a print run of actual books, the last of which have been reserved for subscribers to this blog, but my spouse is working on a second printing, and I recommend that you reserve a copy, as a lot of people seem to have a preference for good old-fashioned print. To reserve your copy, write to catalog@briontoss.com.

Fair leads,

Brion Toss

1. New/Old

While in Sausalito recently, I visited the brigantine Matthew Turner , where a largely volunteer crew — directed and trained by professionals — is putting the finishing touches on a 5-year-long project. This is a purpose-built vessel, 100′ on deck, based on a line of very successful 19th-century trading vessels. It will be dedicated to taking thousands of schoolchildren out on the water every year, to  teach them about the important stuff. You know, science, history, working as a team, and tempering their spirits. It will provide the kind of education that doesn’t just supplement conventional schooling — it transforms and supercharges it. If this sounds a bit exaggerated to you, then you probably haven’t spent much time on traditional sail-training vessels. They provide an unparalleled blend of physical, mental, and spiritual challenges, and they do it while also being a blast of an experience. The Turner is the latest member of the sail training fleet, and by all that I saw, it is going to be one of the best.

This 100′ on deck brigantine is small enough that the crew won’t be dwarfed by the ship, complicated enough to demand skill and effort from its crew, and large enough that, combined with a superlative design (I’m looking at you, Tri-Coastal Marine), it can sail anywhere. I could go on and on about its self-charging all-electric propulsion, its way-redundant safety features, and the quality of its construction, but you really have to see it for yourself.

If you are going to be anywhere near Sausalito, give their office a call, and see about scheduling a tour.

If you can’t get there, cruise around their splendid Web Site.

Whether or not you are going to be anywhere near Sausalito, consider Donating.

Thanks to Sylvia Stompe, Alan Olson, and crew for a great visit.

2. Semi-Old

I also recently visited the Samson Rope factory, near Bellingham, Washington. I love rope factories. I love all the whirling bobbins, the testing machinery, the splicing and analysis and experimentation that goes on there. This place did not disappoint. Of course it helped that I lucked into a tour with Senior R&D engineer Greg Mozgai, one of the savviest rope geeks I know. Again, I could go on and on about alternative yarn-tensioning techniques, abrasion-testing machinery, and the magical way that hundreds of nearly invisible yarns drift through the air, converge, and suddenly turn into a big piece of exquisitely braided rope. But I won’t. Get thee to a rope factory.

On my way out, I saw a weary-looking piece of rope on the wall, set on one side of a poster. Intrigued, I looked closer. Here it is:

That’s right, that little eyesplice hoisted John Glenn out of the drink at the conclusion of the Friendship 7 flight. Yes, the text says “Apollo” instead of “Mercury,” but that doesn’t make this splice any less of a sacred artifact.

3. Very New

This is about one more visit, this one to our son, his bride, and a new arrival. It was a visit that had nothing whatsoever to do with rigging, but I have become a grandparent, and that has activated my have-to-show-you-a-picture-of-my-grandchild gene. So without further ado, here is the amazing Riley Gray:

Ain’t she something?

Fair leads,

Brion Toss

PS,

My book on life aloft, Falling, will make a perfect gift for someone special this year, and since it is an e-book, you can get it without leaving home. Do that. Or maybe the e-book version of the Rigger’s Apprentice. Or if actual physical objects are more your style, visit our Online Store.

Happy Holy Days.

In our most recent rigging workshop one of our students, the estimable Scot Jones, of Monterey Boatworks, took a video of the going-aloft lecture. Typically, we get one of our students into a harness to demonstrate the lecture, and in this case Olivia Gualda, a theater rigger from Las Vegas, was our volunteer. To see an excerpt of the session, click HERE

Before this video excerpt started, I had already gone through the basic safety protocols, explaining among many other things that we use two halyards, with one as a safety. We gave a “jump test” on both halyards, imposing an impact load to make sure of their integrity, just as we would for any other aloft work. In this case the safety goes to a handy-billy, tended by our rigger Julia Briggs.

The video opens with Olivia starting to climb, and Julia taking up the slack in the safety. Note that Julia is not adding any help; she is  just keeping the slack out of the safety, in case the primary fails. Yes, the ratchet makes a big difference, but also yes, Olivia is that strong.

We go on to talk about belays, bracing against the mast, and other details, and then, at about 1:37, we conduct the “Inversion Ritual.” The idea is that you cannot fall out of a good, properly-adjusted harness, and I find it useful to prove that to yourself, to reassure your hindbrain that at least you don’t have to worry about that particular misfortune, and that therefore you can devote more of your energies to dealing with all the actual scary realities of working aloft.

A bit later, Olivia “faints,” as we talk about planning for rescue aloft.

The balance of the video covers some of the many, many other aspects of good aloft practices. People can — and should — take days to learn this stuff thoroughly, but in our classes we at least try to introduce the students to some of the most important details.

I think we are just about at the point where I can, with a clear conscience, recommend that you add items from our Catalog to your Holiday shopping lists.

For more on working aloft, please see my Working Aloft video, in which a much younger me goes into all of this in much greater detail. You can find it in the video section of our catalog. Just click Here and scroll down.You’ll also find written aloft-going ideas in the Rigger’s Apprentice. That is available on Amazon and other sites, but if you want an autographed copy, click Here.

If you don’t have a solid, hang-time-optimized climbing harness, you might want to see about getting one of ours. To learn more about the one in the video (I helped design it), see Here

Finally, it is about time you treated yourself and/or a loved one to Falling.  It’s an e-book, which means you can drop it into the email queues of all of your friends and family. It’s available from iBooks as well as Amazon.

Maritime artisans are a fortunate lot in general; we get to sail in and work on beautiful vessels, and to practice the elegant, intricate arts that make those vessels work. We got to learn those arts because of the patience and generosity of our teachers. I believe we have a responsibility to pass those arts on to others, and I am not alone in that regard. Case in point: on the same weekend that our shop gave a rigging course, Carol Hasse and her crew at Port Townsend Sails held one on the design, construction and maintenance of sails (That’s Lacy Capel, one of Hasse’s crew, in the picture above, helping one of her students with a sewing machine puzzle). Hasse’s loft is upstairs from ours. Meanwhile in the back of this same building Emiliano Marino, author of The Sailmaker’s Apprentice, was giving a specialized class focusing on traditional sail handwork skills.

So over the course of a weekend people came here from all over, to learn self-reliance, practical skills, and an appreciation for the ingenuity, toughness, and resourcefulness of our forebears. In a world where  manual skills are often being marginalized, these maritime trades can offer humans a way to make themselves personally useful. It doesn’t hurt that the resulting products are beautiful.

For more on this, here is an article from our local paper:

Traditional skills make for self-sufficient sailors

Many thanks to the Port Townsend Leader in general, and to reporter Lily Haight in particular.

Thanks to all of you who have written with nice things to say about Falling. It was fun to write, and it is fun to know that so many of you are enjoying it.

Hi All,

Most of the time we use turnbuckles for tensioning standing rigging, and block-and-tackle and/or winches for running rigging, but handwork for fabrication often involves tension, and for this we will sometimes revert to more atavistic techniques, like using heaving mallets. These are basically rolling levers, used to tighten seizings and other knot structures, drawing them tighter than one can do by hand. In the picture above, I am finishing a twine seizing on a lower shroud pair. That black rope is a high-modulus 3-strand rope from Whitehill. The core of each strand is made of Vectran, so the rope is about as strong as 1×19 wire of the same diameter, but much lighter. Marvelous stuff. Note that I would use a solid thimble for more significant loads than this vessel will impose on this piece.

The idea of shroud pairs is that you can make two shrouds from a single, continuous piece of wire or rope. That way you only need to make one terminal at the upper end, instead of two, so you don’t need as many eyes stacked aloft, in traditional configurations, or as many tangs, in modern configurations. But this trick will only work if the seizings are really, really good, such that if one leg of the pair is damaged and loses tension, the seizing won’t slip, and also slack the remaining leg. Seizings just don’t work on uncovered Spectra — too slick — but we have tested it to typical load limits on the Whitehill rope, and the most we got was a minor, expected deformation of the seizing. By the way, seizings are also not trustworthy on most “conventional” ropes, like Nylon and Dacron, because these ropes get much thinner when tensioned, so that seizings that start out very tight get very loose, and slip.

One tricky thing about using HM fiber rigging is that, while it isn’t elastic once it is set up, its strands need to be “settled” to remove any constructional stretch. This means pulling on it really, really hard, typically at least 5% of its rated strength, before measuring it and cutting it for its finished length. If you don’t do this, and just splice both ends, you can get a piece of rigging that might grow 6″ or more before it stops elongating. We tensioned the piece in that picture to somewhat over 1,500lbs on the rigging posts out behind our shop. We still use those posts for their original purpose — the relatively mild tensions needed for full-length service — but a significant portion of what we do now involves Whitehill’s rope, as well as the 12-strand Spectra from New England Rope and Colligo. The added tension has resulted in our heaving right out of the ground the concrete anchors to which our posts are stayed. This has happened three times now, but after the last time we put in some serious concrete boulders, and I think things will hold.

That’s fine, but the same increased tensions have wrought havoc on the hardware at the top of the posts. In the picture below you can see how the metal is just peeling away. We solved this problem by another form of old-school rigging: thumb cleats, onto which we landed Spectra grommets. I’ll post a picture of them in action soon.

Our rigging post Wianno-Lorca, with its post-top hardware suffering the effects of excess tension.

Another, less dramatic application for heaving mallets is tightening Constrictor Knots, which are basically hose clamps made out of twine (seriously, they are sometimes used for that). Recently our star rigger Jen Bates, and her probably-soon-to-be star rigger son, Chance, teamed up to seize D-rings on a client’s boat. These D-rings live at chest height, usually on the upper shrouds. We run jacklines from the stern, up through the rings, then down to the bow. This way you have a higher barrier to falling overboard, and you can work with a very short tether, instead of dragging a long clunky one down the deck. Anyway, we apply 4 or 5 double Constrictors to the D-rings, onto a short portion of the shroud that has been served. Seizings and service are made with tarred nylon twine. The stuff is remarkably durable, as the setup on numerous circumnavigating rigs has proven. We treat the wire under the service to prevent crevice corrosion, and haven’t had any problems there.

To tighten the Constrictors, the team applies a heaving mallet to each end of the knot, then takes up together until the knot is hard. They never work loose. For more on this knot, and on heaving, see the Rigger’s Apprentice, or come by and visit the shop.

Jen and Chance setting up to seize on D-rings for chest-high jacklines.

PS, In writing this, I am reminded that I loaned some trusted person a heaving mallet  (Mallet de Mer) and a seizing screw, but for the life of me I can’t recall who it was. If it was you, would you return them? Soon?

PPS,

My newest book, Falling, has been out for a little over a month now, and I am just going to go all proud-parent about it for a moment: Sales standings fluctuate frequently, but it is consistently in the top 20 in its categories on Amazon, and has had a few incursions into the top 10. Yay. It is an e-book, and to get your copy, click: Here. If you are on a Mac, get thee to iBooks. Reviews welcome!

You never know what kind of boat is going to show up in front of our shop. Last month it was a great big steel replica of a Thames sailing barge, but because even that would have been a bit too plain for jaded Port Townsend tastes, this one had a theatrical gridwork superimposed on the rig (see picture above), because this barge, the Amara Zee, is the floating, sailing stage for the Caravan Stage Company, who have toured the world putting on shows that mix Monkey Wrench Gang, Cirque de Soleil, surreal fever dreams, and Ecotopian fantasy in more or less equal measures. We got to help out a teensy bit with setup, and I was worried that Julia, one of our riggers, was going to run away with the circus.

The troupe put on several nighttime shows in Point Hudson, amazing and amusing us with way-aloft acrobatics, first-rate music (much of it live), plus film and special effects, all in the interests of telling the tale of a post-apocalyptic struggle between Monarch butterflies and evil petro-gnomes. You had to be there. No, you need to be there. The show is off for the winter, but you can catch their wanderings here: The Caravan Stage Company.

Once the Amara Zee had cleared the harbor, we returned to more prosaic vessels, like a nice Wauquiez in need of a general rig upgrade, and a Passport 40 in need of chainplates. More on these projects anon. Meanwhile I mentioned a fiber-rigged Ingrid 38 in a previous post (see Our New Rigger) but I didn’t include a picture of the whole boat, so here it is:

Not your typical Ingrid. The owner, Cindy Stahl, is a recently-retired tugboat captain, who spent much of the last year utterly rebuilding the boat. The 3-strand Vectran standing rigging

— much of which she and her son Ethan did the splicing of — was just one aspect. It all cam out beautifully, and Cindy took it on a splendid solo shakedown cruise.

I will leave  you with a plug for my little ebook about adventures aloft. Thanks to all of you who have said such kind things about it. All the rest of you, here’s a  little preview:

You can get your own copy downloaded from either Amazon or Apple.

Fair leads,

Brion Toss