How to Tie Stop Knots : Sailing Lessons Online

Video Transcript

" Hello! My name is Kevin Winsley and I’m with Offshore Sailing School and now on Expert Village, I’d like to show you two to three stop knots. What we would tie a stop knot for would be if you passed a piece of line say through a sheave or through a block and it was expected to come tight, you didn’t want it run free, what we have to do is tie a knot on the end of the line that prevents that happening. One of the ones we like to use in the Offshore Sailing School is the stopper knot and the way to tie a stopper knot is to take the end of the line, you run it across and around your fingers, just like this and take the tail end, catch the two pieces of line, run all the way through the middle and then pull tight and there you have the stopper knot. So that would come tight. Another one that people use a lot is called a figure-8. To tie a figure-8 what we’ll do is we’ll hold the line up like this and have the short tail hanging down and then you simply going to go around one and a half times. So, you come around and then an half turn again and this time the tail end comes up through the top loop making the figure-8 and then that too when it comes tight, one step to the block. The last one, which is a bit of fun is called an admiralty stopper and sometimes called the blood knot. A blood knot you tie like this, you have to wind the tail around the standing line three times and then take the tail back up through the middle and cinch it down. Also called a barrel knot, but the reason it’s called the blood knot because this is the knot they would tie in the cat of nine tails for when they were going to whip someone. Something, we don’t use in offshore anymore."