Category: seamanship

Buttons and collars — marlinespike seamanship

I returned from Virginia to find a long box on the dining room table with a pair of new spruce Shaw & Tenney oars to replace the faithful, but fast fading crap basswood oars that have served me for the last six or so years.

Shaw & Tenney is an ancient company in Orono, Maine that makes very nice (and expensive) oars and paddles. I ordered my pair back in June, and finally, with summer on the wane, they arrived. After placing dead fat last in the morning skiff race, I opted out of the second punishment, came home, and sat down on the back deck with my ditty bag to get some leather onto my new blades.

Chafing is the enemy of the sailor, and a lot of seamanship is devoted to cutting down on friction. A frayed line, a chafed sail, or a worn spar can mean disaster at the wrong time and in the wrong conditions, so one does what they can to keep a boat from rubbing itself apart. Leather is a staple of any ditty bag, generally high quality tanned stuff for applying to spars where they rub against other spars. Boom crutches and gaff jaws are two places where some well applied leather will protect the brightwork (varnish), but nowhere is it more useful (and good looking) than on the looms of a nice pair of oars.

I have collars and buttons on my old oars, but I tacked the leather in place with bronze brads — a bad but quick way to get the leather on and the method preferred by my grandfather on his ash oars. Bronze looks good when it corrodes green with verdigris, but one is putting two rows of small holes into the oar which will eventually let water in and cause the oar to swell, split, and fail. So I decided to put my collars and buttons on the old school way — with needle and thread, and for an hour today put my ditty bag to good work. Paul Gartside, a boat builder in British Columbia, has excellent instructions on how to do this.
First, I took a leather collar kit and marked the leather around the shaft, centering the leather about 24 inches from the end of the grips. Shaw & Tenney recommends 20 inches, but I like to have my oar handles close together, so I move the collars out.

I marked the circumference of the oars on the rough side of the leather and cut it with a single-edged razor blade using a steel ruler as a straight edge. Then, with the ruler as a quide, I marked twenty points 3/8ths of a inch apart on each edge, and popped them through with a hammer and nail over a piece of scrap wood (an awl also works well). The holes don’t need to be particularly large, just punctures to guide the needle.

I lace with a six-foot piece of dacron sail thread thoroughly waxed with beeswax. I use two egg-eye needles — stout and blunt tipped on each end of the thread. Some experts call for shorter thread for ease of use, but I go with a long piece so I can have one continuous piece. I laced these leathers on by putting the oar across my lap, and had my sailor’s palm on my right hand to help drive the needles through. The stitch is easy — essentially the same pattern as a shoelace.

I start with a few passes on the top edge, pulling the dacron very tight to bring the two edges of the leather together. I cut the leather about 3/16ths short in the expectation that the lacing will bring it together super-tight around the loom of the oar.

I run the thread up and back, and wind up with this:

I finish it off with a Turk’s head over the button, and with some care, these oars should last at least ten years.

Tying the Turk’s Head

In marlinspike seamanship there are practical and decorative arts. Practical work is the province of the rigger, serving and parceling, baggywrinkle and splices, the rope and cable work necessary to step spars, rig them, and get a boat in order for the sea. The decorative arts were born probably out of boredom in the forecastle of many a vessel, and I’ve read of captains who felt it important to lay in a store of “small stuff” before casting off — thin line and twine — so their crews could keep their hands occupied and their minds off of wormy hardtack and tyrannical mates.

I’ve always been a fan of the Turk’s Head, a relatively ancient knot that is best described as a circular braid tied around tillers and railings, and people’s wrists and ankles — hence its other name, the Sailor’s Bracelet. They aren’t the easiest thing to learn how to tie, but once you do a few it becomes pretty simple and takes only ten minutes to knock off a simple bracelet for a nephew or a niece. These are popular emblems of the summer for kids around Cotuit, and I can recall wearing mine back to school and leaving it on well into the fall term until it became too dirty and smelly to ignore anymore and had to be cut off.

Turk’s Heads can be fantastically complex affairs that are much broader than a bracelet and can cover fairly wide expanses. The old village doctor, Dr. Donald Higgins, was a prodigious knot tier and the tiller of his catboat always sported a beautiful example of one of the more complex knots.

Jack Gartside Boats
Uncle Fester — who knows my mathematical limits — would laugh his butt off if he saw me try to pass the following statement off without attribution, so of course I will credit the Wikipedia. Let’s just say there are some very interesting patterns possible … and rendered impossible, but the math behind the knot is what makes Turk’s Heads an interesting diversion on a rainy day:

“Mathematically, the number of strands is the greatest common divisor of the number of leads and the number of bends; the knot may be tied with a single strand if and only if the two numbers are coprime.For example, 3 lead x 5 bight (3×5), or 5 lead x 7 bight (5×7).”

I won’t give instructions, but there are some good resources. I do not suggest learning how to tie the knot following Clifford Ashley’s The Ashley Book of Knots. And Tom Hall’s Introduction to Turk’s-Head Knots, is good, but also a bit dense. My daughter got the knack from following a simple single-sheet at Jan Brett’s site.

Now my next project it to make a fancy lanyard as strap for my new sunglasses.