WATCH THE FULL VIDEO WITH ALL 25 KNOTS. YOU CAN ALSO STREAM CLIPS OF INDIVIDUAL KNOTS.
Master Sailing Rigger, Brion Toss introduces his 25 Basic Sailing Knots, the rope material you can use to tie the knots, and the material you shouldn't use. Brion demonstrates the easiest way to tie each knot a...

Master Sailing Rigger, Brion Toss introduces his 25 Basic Sailing Knots, the rope material you can use to tie the knots, and the material you shouldn't use. Brion explains his hand movement technique to tie knots. He provides an an example by demonstrating the easiest and most fluid way to tie th...

Brion Toss identifies the different parts of the rope he will use to explain and demonstrate how to tie a variety of basic sailing knots.

A Butterfly Knot is a loop, something you can just drop over an object and put to work. We use this knot instead of a Bolen in many applications, because it's far more versatile. You can tie it and then pull on any or all three of these ends, and it won't slip or jam. It's more secure than a Bole...

The Bowline: King of Knots. Way overrated. The Bowline is not the best at anything. It isn't the strongest or the most secure. It isn't the easiest to tie or untie. And in addition, the Bowline suffers some serious drawbacks in modern materials where it can come apart when you don't want it to. H...

Named after Clifford W. Ashley, author of The Book of Knots. It's number 1452 in that magnificent book. This beautiful bend is the optimal bend, and for a variety of reasons. One is that when drawn up, it has a perfect lead. It's sticking out at other than a right angle, so you can drag it back ...

What happens if you have one end and an eye splice? You bend it together with a knot called a Double Beckett Bend. It's structurally the same as a Double Sheet Bend, but you just weave the end around and around through the eye splice, and then dried up. Here's how you tie it.

Great though the Ashley Bend is, it does have limitations. If you have two different sizes or even two different consistencies of rope, you want to tie a Double Sheet Bend, and it's adapted to two different rope sizes. Here's how you make it.

Sometimes quick release knots are handy. For instance, if you have an eye splice with a Beckett Bend, you can weave the end around as from a Single Sheet Bend. But instead of passing the end through, you just pull a bite through. That way it'll hold in light duty situations, but you can clear it ...

The Single Slipknot is right handy for light duty stuff. You don't want to leave it alone for a long time. And that's true of most Slipknot's. There's one exception, though. It's called the Cavalry Hitch. It was developed for tying up horses, always nodding their heads and yanking on their reins ...

The Buntline Hitch is a wonderful old square rigger knot. It's essentially a clove hitch with the end trapped inside. So when you fetch it up against an object, the end cannot come loose unlike the Round Turn and Two Half Hitches. Harder to untie than a Bowline and harder to untie than a lot of k...

A round turn and two half hitches is an ancient sailor's knot. The saying goes, a round turn and two half hitches never fail. But with today's modern springing ropes, it's much more likely the first hitch will work loose and fall apart, and the whole thing will come undone. So it's a good basic u...

Most knots are meant for pulling sideways on objects, but the Rolling Hitch is one that's used for pulling a lengthwise plane parallel with the object. So, it has to generate friction, so it won't slide down. Here are three variations: Regular, Rigger's, Camel.

The Rolling Hitch family and all of its variations have been around for millennia and have adapted pretty well to modern applications and high loads. But if you get a really high load on a really slick object with really slick rope, they will slip. Worse than that, they tend to kink lines that th...

Super strong modern rope is smaller diameter for the same load making them really hard to hang on to. If you're doing lashings, you just can't pull hard enough without hurting your hands. You've got to add a handle to the rope. That's where the Pilingspike Hitch comes in.

One way to belay to yourself is the Carabiner Hitch, also known as the Meunter Hitch to climbers.

The Constrictor is a binding knot. if the Bowline is the king of knots, the Constrictor is definitely the queen. All the rope ends in our video are seized with constrictor knots instead of a palm and needle wiping, much faster and easier. You can also use the Constrictor for emergency hose clamps...

Here we are aboard Martha, arguably the prettiest schooner in Puget Sound, which is to say in the world, I'm going to show you a couple of Belays. Now, a belay is a very demanding situation. If it was just a matter of fixing a line to an object, we could use a Bowline or a Buntline Hitch. It woul...

Now we're going to belay to a Belaying Pin. This is a highly evolved belaying tool, specifically for securing lines. First thing to remember is, go to the far end first.

Now we're going to belay to a cleat, another tool designed for belaying, but it only works well if we use it right. Like the Belaying Pin, we want to make sure we go to the far end of the cleat first. You never want to touch the near end first. If you do that, after just one or two contacts, you'...

Lashings are a huge family of knots. They're a field expedient way to attach things to each other. People are still tying boats and buildings together using string, essentially. If you do it right, you can do amazing things with lashings. And in the modern rigging world, using high modulus materi...

Another ancient favorite, the Square Knot, profoundly useful. But severe limitations. Very dangerous Knot, as you'll see, probably injured and killed more people than all other knots combined. Every tool brings with it an element of risk. This is true of all the knots that we're using. Everything...

Turns out somewhere in the world, just about every basic knot is considered a Good Luck Knot. There are very few unlucky knots. The one that people generally agreed was the best Good Luck Knot is the one I'm going to show you. It's from China and it's a simple loop. And it's relatively easy to tie.

Watch the full series of Brion Toss rigging videos here on Sailflix.com and on TheSailingChannel.TV.