Re: Knots. Paracord. Braid. Weave. Help!
Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2018 3:02 pm
delliottg wrote:I use a figure eight in the bight as a load cinch with a couple of half hitches to secure it. Easy to tie, easy to adjust, and easy to untie when it's time. I have a friend who's a scout master who can't tie a knot to save his life. I demonstrated how to use the figure eight to tie down loads on his car and he just couldn't figure it out. I've been doing it so long I don't even think about it. His boy isn't much better, I always thought scouts were taught how to tie knots, but maybe not any longer?
In USN boot camp we had to tie the "knot of the day" into a piece of line hanging from the foot of your rack each morning. So many guys couldn't do it, that only two of us were allowed by the company commander to tie everyone's knots for them every morning. I slept on the upper deck, so I did all of them up there, and the other guy who slept on the lower deck did all of those. I always thought they should learn how to do it themselves as that's the point of going to boot camp, to learn new stuff, but I wasn't going to argue with the CC about it. I'm sure the barracks inspection team were astounded to find every single knot looked exactly the same.
When we first got to Worm Island, I heard that a couple guys in each company tied all of the knots.
In practice, we didn't even have knot tying in our company.
Our CC was a coke head who slept half the day.
I still can't march for shit, learned most of knot tying from my experience racing sailboats.