The time a supervisor told me my knots were too pretty for salvage work in Norfolk

I was on a salvage job in Norfolk a couple years back, using these super neat bowline knots on every lift bag. My supervisor saw the job photos and said 'those look nice but they'll slip under load, you need fisherman's bends with backup.' I'd been doing them the same way for 2 years before that. Swapped to his method next dive and my gear stopped getting hung up on debris. Has anyone else had to unlearn a knot they were dead sure was fine?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_charlie19d ago

My buddy Mike was a rigger on a bridge project up in Portland and he swore by the figure eight follow-through for everything. He'd been tying them for years and thought they were bombproof. Then one day a load shifted and the knot actually started creeping open under a dynamic load, not even that heavy. His foreman walked over, looked at it, and just said "that's a climbing knot, not a working knot." Mike switched to double fisherman's bends after that and his gear stopped doing that weird looseness thing. It's wild how one knot can be perfect for one situation and totally wrong for another.

grace_knight7019d ago

So @the_charlie's buddy basically learned the hard way that figure eights are for hanging yourself off a cliff not for holding up a bridge. Guess that's why they call it "climbing gear" and not "crane gear.

uma68519d agoTop Commenter

Grace_knight70 kind of nailed it with that "climbing knot, not a working knot" thing... I always thought figure eights were basically fail-safe until reading this. Hearing how Mike's foreman just called it like it was really changed my mind on using the same knot for everything. Different jobs definitely need different knots, that much is clear now.