Page 10 - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice

Preface

30 years ago, with an old cable spool as a chair, and field are applicable in another, but we all have a lot
my workbench as a desk, I began to write the first to learn from one another.
version of this book. I wrote longhand, on a yellow
legal tablet, slowly filling page after page with what I DO THE MATH
hoped and meant would become a primer on sailing
vessel rigging. I wrote as much to refine and clarify Many of my clients have been engineers or archi-
my own meager understanding of the subject as to tects, and they have been unfailingly generous
inform anyone else; even then I had an inkling of and patient in expanding my understanding of the
the vast scale of what there was to know about rig- design aspects of the art. Rueful admission: when I
ging, and how incomplete my own comprehension was in high school, there was only one class about
was. But I was also filled with an evangelical zeal. I which I said, “I’ll never use this crap.” That class
wanted the world to know about this beautiful art. was trigonometry. It turns out that you cannot be
In the years since, I have worked on hundreds a competent rigger without some understanding of
(thousands?) of rigs. On some days, I seem to have trigonometry.
acquired some level of competence. On other days,
the learning curve is unbearably steep. On those TRUST/VERIFY
days, to paraphrase Clifford Ashley, I feel that if
I can just keep improving at this rate, and if my Whether you get your information from a profes-
health holds out, I might someday manage to get a sional, or someone down the dock, or YouTube, be
grasp of the fundamentals. Therefore, gentle reader, sure of its validity before you put it into practice.
consider this new edition to be a work in progress. It Math can be a big help here, but so can discussion,
is certainly an improvement on the previous edition direct experiment, and common sense. This advice
—almost every page of my copy is marked with red (I pause here to wince) goes for some of the rec-
ink—and in addition to corrections and evolutions ommendations found in previous editions of this
you will find new ways of thinking about and work- book. The current one as well, for all I know. You
ing with rigging. can be wrong about things you sincerely believe in.
Some general bits of advice: It is overwhelmingly likely that you are wrong about
many things, right now. This can have a paralyz-
CROSS-POLLINATE ing effect, partly because it can be embarrassing,
but mostly because, in rigging, people’s lives are at
In the course of my career it has been my privilege stake; your beliefs translate directly to safety. Or
to work with theater riggers, industrial riggers, not. That’s why we have civilization, which at its
arborists, timber framers, circus riggers, mountain best functions as a non-genetic means of preserv-
climbers, etc., in addition to riggers of all types of ing and transmitting aids to survival. Test results,
sailing vessels. The particulars of each branch of the engineering standards, theories, and algorithms are
art vary widely, and not all of the insights in one the left-brain means to this end. But don’t underes-

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