Boating Knots Index

These animated knots are primarily for boaters, but many are useful for anyone who uses rope and values safety. Applications:

The nautical knots used when berthing a large vessel, docking your yacht, tying up dinghy painters, and managing sails are all aimed at safety and reliability. The emphasis for boating knots is on reliability matched with the ability to untie each knot fairly easily.

In many boating knots it is convenient to talk about the standing end- which takes the strain, and the bitter End - the loose end in your hand. This name arises from securing hawsers on large ships. After being winched tight, the strain on the hawser was temporarily taken with a second rope attached to the hawser with a rolling hitch The hawser was taken off the winch and the end, now loose, was then transferred to the Bitts - hence the name Bitter End. Bitts are the strong posts (see picture on right) to which the rope is secured - using figure of eight turns.

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