Flotsam & Jetsam
Your letters and such...
Lots of giveaways lately. Congrats to Mark Bertacchi on winning the Malahit radio. And congrats to George Brindle and Jim Troutman on winning the solar crank radios. More giveaways soon.
And congrats to subscribers Mike Yates and Shawn Payment on winning one of the Boye Boating and Rescue Knives.
Speaking of knives, David Peebles wrote:
I find that the serrated knives I use (much cheaper than yours) can be problematic when trying to cut rope. The teeth, though sharpened in such a way that they should cut the fibers, seem to hang up on them instead. The only way to cut line is to take a very aggressive pulling slice to overcome this (hopefully, but not reliably). But the knives in your article do show shallower gullets between teeth, so maybe they slice rather than simply hanging up. The vid showing the slicing of small segments off the end of some rope (about 12 mm, or so?) is impressive.
I still prefer a very sharp regular blade, especially since it can be used to carve or whittle wood and other materials as well as slice rope.
Reader Kyle Reed sent the following note:
I just thought I would send a link to a sailboat for sale on Portland Craigslist. I have no affiliation, although I did get to check it out a number of years ago when the owner lived in Astoria.
The boat is a Devlin Eider, and it graced the cover of your fine magazine many years ago in issue #64.
If I didn’t already have two working boats and one project boat, a Devlin Nancy’s China, I’d buy it. Super cool boat with mini wood stove.
https://portland.craigslist.org/mlt/boa/d/portland-devlin-sailboat/7870900807.html
Eider's Cap'n Kirk Gresham's former boat. A Good Boat, but she's been misunderstood since he sold her, and she suffered a cracked bowsprit and some scrapes and bruises from an encounter with a pylon of the Tacoma Narrows bridge during the second Salish 100. Kirk had her sprit mainsail cleverly set up for easy reefing -- as see here during a breezy sail-by at the Port Townsend Festival in 2012:
https://flic.kr/p/dKmscK
During the second Salish 100 Eider had lost the sprit and sported a short lugsail yard on the head of the original spritsail, with the luff still attached to the mast! <sigh> Here she is after the Narrows mishap:
https://flic.kr/p/2rqJo5D
Eider will make somebody a nice boat if they give her back the rig Cap'n Kirk had on her.
The comments regarding the amount of "waviness" on a rope knife is something that I have some experience with. When I was head of product development at a marine company, we sourced knives and pocket tools from a very good Taiwanese manufacturer. My goal was to have a really good folding knife for $20 retail. We specified 440C, not 440A steel for the blade for example, which cost us an additional $.50 per unit. One of the toughest things to describe to our vendor was the profile of the "waves" in the blade. During development, we had come across other knives with an aggressive sawtooth-like profile which grabbed at the rope fibers, which was made MUCH worse when cutting high tenacity fibers like Vectran and HMPE (high modulus polyethylene).
The angle of the "ramp" on each tooth was vitally important. Too steep, and the teeth would grab the fibers. Too shallow, and you might as well use a straight blade. Quality manufacturers like Boye and Spyderco had figured this out all along.
Incidentally, my $20 rope knife know retails for $28, and someone along the way substituted 440A steel so they could save some money while hoping the customers wouldn't notice. Another example of J. A. Richards comment about consumers being duped by low prices and shoddy quality.
Chuck Hawley
Small boats owned: Heritage 15, Harbor 20, Viper 640, Bristol Skiff 17, lots of RIBs