Seaworthy Knots
*A Sailor's* -Best Friend-
As humans progressed and the size of our needs alongside it, newer and more intricate knots prevailed. It’s hard to not imagine the importance of a good knot in early seafaring days, when sailing ships were held together with hemp, tar and knots.
There’s an absolutely true story of a local man forgetting the boat anchor for a fishing trip. So he lashes a rope to the handle of a heavy toolbox and lowers it from the boat into the Gulf. The toolbox holds and the man enjoys the fishing and the warm sunshine. The man pats himself on the back for his ingenuity. The day ends and the man starts to retrieve the toolbox. Uh- oh, the knot on the handle is so poorly fastened it slips off. The man is left with a section of wet rope. His toolbox and thousands of dollars in tools sit at the bottom of the Gulf. The man feels sort of dumb.
While there are many, many other stories like this— you probably know one— the man gained an important and lasting lesson: A good knot, the right knot, gets the job done every time. It has been a critical tool over the centuries, from a surgeon’s delicate suture to a secure fishing lure to the simple act of tying shoelaces; knots have played a key role. Knots even identify cultures and social customs. They’ve helped us snare food and climb mountains, they’ve kept sailing ships and balloons afloat and even helped in educating kids.
“[ You] want to build self- confidence in a child, teach them how to tie knots,” says Greg Graham, Scout Executive and CEO of the Southwest Florida region Boy Scouts of America. “Knots stimulate thought processes, help build conceptuality skills. And knots are always relatable to real- life usage.”
As a fifth- generation commercial fisherman, Stephen Phanco is all about the water. Compact and wiry, he speaks mystically about the ocean, equating time in utero to a divine instinct to work the ocean. He is also about knots. Thick, dry hands attest heavy fish netting. Phanco utilizes 39 years of cumulative fishing today to mend and assemble casting nets. He sells them at Florida bait shops. A casting net is round and weighted at the edges with lead. The user flings the net like a cowboy issuing a lasso, lets it settle to the bottom of the water, and then retrieves it by a drawstring. It is used largely to ensnare baitfish, but some use the bigger nets to catch game fish, which may be on your dinner table tonight. Phanco’s smaller nets fetch more than a hundred bucks.
Knots are crucial to the cast- net process. Using a plastic needle the size of a Sharpie marker to interlace pie- shaped sections of netting into 6-, 10- and 12- foot nets, Phanco sitting at a bench in a Port Charlotte garage weaves 500 half- hitch knots into a 10- foot net. His work is so like centuries ago, you seem to hear seagulls barking as he strings knots. “I was literally a baby put in a fish box,” Phanco says of his bed aboard the family trawler in Pine Island. “Fishing, knots and nets are my family’s history. It’s what I am.”
Rich Martin is a veteran angler and guide. Still, a poor knot cost him a boat. In a small cove of thrashing waves in Bermuda, Martin lashed line around a cleat, not using the traditional hitch to secure the knot. As the wind shifted, the boat swung wildly. The stress loosened the knot, allowing surging waves to swamp the boat. “I lost everything, the motor, my equipment,” says Martin, who works at Capt. Rob’s Bait & Tackle in Cape
Coral. “I thought ‘ oh, man.’ That wasn’t so smart. I will tell you it never happened again.”
Only in Florida would a man like Bernd Marzulla pop up: a rabid American saltwater fishing junkie with a German accent. Knots are a passion at Crazy Lure Bait & Tackle, the Cape Coral shop where Marzulla dishes tips on tying hook/ leader knots. If a hook knot is not formed and drawn correctly, there’s a weak point, and it “won’t verk,” says Marzulla. His hands twist fish line into knots quickly and assuredly. But he is patient with the novice, and more slowly, a second time, works his hand tricks. It’s amazing to observe.
Like a million other fishermen, Marzulla discovered a good knot due to repeated failure. The end of a fishing line with a lost lure is called a pigtail or a curlicue. To avoid a pigtail, Marzulla spits on the knot as it is pulled tightly on the hook— friction heat weakens the knot. He also recommends learning knots that join fish line and leaders, and knots that join two lines of differing size, as well as specialty knots. One special knot is the snell, which rather than threading the hook eye, wraps the fishing line around the shaft of the hook, so that the lure can’t swivel. He says YouTube is ideal to observe professionals knot hooks. And if you continue to reel in a pigtail, “you have done sumzing stupid,” he says.
Fort Myers fisherman Jeff Sims says his father looped a truck inner tube over a dock piling, fastened rope to the tube and knotted a shark hook to the rope. He’d bait with a slab of fish. Inevitably, the father hooked a flounder of several hundred pounds, the truck tube taut, the fish angrily thrashing. But the hook knot never failed to hold, Sims explains. “But what kind of knots my father used, I couldn’t tell you,” he says. “… all I know is that was how he fed his family. A well- tied knot never lets me down.”
Knot- making dates back centuries, well before sailing ships. The first documented book on rope types and knots, A Sea
Grammar, was published in 1627. Rope then was made of plant fibers, strips of animal skins, even hair, according to Henry Bushby, a noteworthy writer on knots. His 1902 manual, The
Henry Bushby Manuscript, details knot evolution, noting that as humans progressed and the size of our needs alongside it, newer and more intricate knots prevailed. It’s hard to not imagine the importance of a good knot in early seafaring days, when sailing ships were held together with hemp, tar and knots.
Bushby and others document three basic knots serving early sailors: the wall, bowline and sheepshank. The wall is a more decorative and functional knot, the bowline is a loop
A good knot, the right knot, gets the job done every time. It has been a critical tool over the centuries, from a surgeon’s delicate suture to a secure fishing lure to the simple act of tying shoelaces; knots have played a key role.
knot, and the sheepshank is used to conjoin two ropes ( sailors substitute the word line for rope). Many dozens of knots have since evolved. The clove hitch, the slip, the square and the sheet- bend join the bowline and sheepshank as the six common knots sailors use. The Boy Scouts of America suggest scouts learn some 40 knots, Graham points out.
Knots have also served away from the water. In a Hindu wedding ceremony, for instance, the Brahama knot joins the bride and the groom at the loincloth, and the Mayans used knots for the basis of a math system, Bushby wrote. Even Mother Nature uses knots: The Baltimore oriole makes its nest of knotted plant fiber, according to one bird manual, “without hands.”
And think about lashing a kayak, luggage or a bicycle to the roof of a vehicle. How many orphan beer coolers or chairs tumble to the side of the road. And, delicately put, a knot was a last sensation for many atop scaffolding.
The knot is threaded into our many languages. Think about a knot metaphor you may use. How about tying the knot, which implies a metaphor but really means that newlyweds were given a gift bed, with mattress support of knotted rope, literally tying the knot. Do we complain of knotted muscles, a knot in the gut, knotted traffic? Do men ever forget their first successfully knotted tie, a woman a bow or a ribbon for a holiday decoration or a child’s Easter dress? Shoelaces are a right of passage.
Handcrafts like knitting and crocheting use knots, and old furniture was constructed of hemp or rope. Knots are used in hammocks and clothing, where sewing, looming, splicing, plaiting, macraméing, matting and weaving play a part. Knots cinch, bind and ornament. Games and puzzles have long used knots, especially in string games like the mouse, the lark’s head and the cat’s cradle, if only to loop the string. Magicians place the knotted rope in a pocket, pulling it out knot- free.
Before becoming a captain with the Sea Tow franchise, Pete Louzao commanded the Fort Myers Beach Coast Guard Station. He spent decades on the ocean. If anyone appreciates a knot, it’s Pete. Sitting in his Cape Coral office, Louzao slips a length of line through his thick fingers, mindlessly, as an extension of his arms. His best memories are of the old salts in the Coast Guard. Those men “could tie knots behind their backs,” says Louzao, who is big and dark and versed in the language of mariners. “These were men very proficient in the maritime industry ... those days are pretty much over.”