Page 40 - Randy Penn Everything Knots Book

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LEARNING TO TIE KNOTS

snug down the knot, how to tie it quickly, and maybe even how
to tie it without looking. Your skill can improve quite a bit just from
practicing while you’re stuck in traffic (if you’re not at the wheel!)
or waiting at the doctor’s office.

ESSENTIAL

It is best to practice a knot under conditions as close as
possible to its actual use. If you are practicing the Cleat Hitch
for tying up a boat, you will want to practice while keeping
your fingers from coming too close to the cleat. This will help
protect them from being caught when the boat surges on
waves and yanks on the line.

Keeping It All Straight

One of the first impressions an inexperienced knot tyer gets when
thumbing through the many diagrams of a knot book is that it’s all
too much information to remember. Perhaps it is all the seemingly
indistinguishable crossings. But in practice, you’ll soon notice that
each knot takes on very distinctive features that you will come to
remember almost without trying.

Shared Similarities
One of the first things you will discover after learning a few
knots is that they have many similar steps. This means you have
much fewer steps to remember. And the more you become familiar
with knots, the more these similarities become apparent. Similarities
between knots can take on many forms, but the important thing to
understand about any knot is that if you change anything about it,
you must consider it to be a completely different knot, with its own
complete set of properties.
There are a number of ways that different knots can be almost
identical. There could be just one tuck that is over rather than

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