s/v Jedi

Caterpillar to Butterfly

A few weeks ago I was on my usual afternoon photo session in the jungle when I came across my first tropical caterpillar. After returning to "Jedi", I went online to research this caterpillar and see which Butterfly it would change into. Unfortunately none of the photos I found on the Internet matched my caterpillar.

Curious as I am, I decided to capture one and keep it on the boat to keep tabs on it's development. So armed with a cannister with holes in the lid and pair of siccors to cut some leaves for it to eat, I set of on my mission.

The same caterpillar was still there (he must have been waiting for me) and capturing it was a piece of cake. 

The next day while gathering new leaves for my new pet I saw at least 6 more of the same species of caterpillar only much smaller, which led me to believe I would not have to wait too long for some action on the metamorphosis front. Sure enough 2 days later the caterpillar is gone and there is a chrysalis hanging from the lid of the cannister. It was not the chrysalis I had expected, it wasn't nice and smooth but rough and had holes with golden spikes sticking out.

At first I thought it might be dead but the next day when I checked up on him I saw him move, so he was just playing dead. During my research I found out that the chrysalis stage could take from 1 week to a year, depending on various circumstances. Luck was with me for 8 days later there was a beautiful Orange banded Heliconia butterfly in the cannister.

After taking this picture, I took him (I know it was a male because he has brighter colors than the female) back to his place of birth in the jungle, where he  flew away without looking back.

Josie & Nick

Seaman or landlubber ?!

It used to be simple: sailors who decided to start living aboard and wandering about the seas were called cruisers. Unfortunately, you nowadays have some utterly clueless dirt-dwellers who buy a floating condo (=catamaran) thinking they have the ultimate cruising machine (it's what the brochure and salesman said) and that their money has bought them true seamanship. It often ends in drama. What they don't get is that money or extra hulls don't buy safety and the weather and sea will punish whenever boats and their crews are not prepared properly. And that starts with the little things... like proper splicing, seizing and whipping the lines and ropes aboard the boat.

If you are the type that rather buys a can of liquid rubber to dip your rope ends in or worse, just wrap some duct tape around it (the horror!), you better navigate away from this blog because we do things properly here... seamanlike. If you're scared to ruin your manicure or burn, cut and slash your fingers, last chance to leave!

I'm currently modifying and replacing Jedi's lazy jacks. These consist of many pieces of small diameter rope that must be cut to size and finished. This post is about how I do that.

We start with taping and cutting, for which we use a hot-knife. Not any other knife, not a lighter or matches, not even the furnace. We happen to have an expensive professional hot knife which we can afford because of all the savings we got for doing all the canvas work ourselves, but you can also buy cheap versions or soldering-iron attachments that work just as well for cutting rope:

The trick to cut the rope right is to wrap the tape around it real tight so that the diameter becomes a little smaller while the rope stays round-shaped. Remove the tape immediately because most of the burned polyester comes off with the tape while it isn't fully hardened.

The picture above is how many landlubbers think it is supposed to be for the finished product. Well, surprise, we've hardly started yet. You have to put a little bit of your soul into it, or it won't work. Next step we start with the needle and whipping twine. We leave a half rope diameter clear and then make two stitches (pass the needle through three times) with the second stitch locking the first one by stitching through it's thread like so: 

Now we wrap the end for a length of 1.5 times the rope diameter. My whipping twine is 0.5mm and the rope is 5mm so I have to wrap 15 turns. All those must be neat and tight. Exactly where the 15th turn completes, we put the needle through the rope again:

Now we stitch two full turns around the whipping, through the rope, so that it will never move up or down the rope. Here the first half turn is done; make it tight:

And so we get to the locking and finishing touch. Pay attention, this is the difficult part :-) We start by bringing the needle from inside the two outer turns to the outside like so:

Click on that picture to get a bigger version if you need to see closer. After the two turns around the whipping, the twine comes through the rope again at the end of those turns. That is where the knot will be. Put the needle through like shown above and pull the thread through tight. Next, bring the needle from outside the other loop back into the middle, like so:

These shots were done with a Canon 5D Mk.2 with 100mm macro lens at life size... click on the pics for bigger versions and you can even go to full resolution from there. From the above position, pull the needle and thread all the way through but not tight yet. Don't put the needle through the loop of twine. Now, before we are pulling this knot tight, there is one more stitch, back in where we came out the rope, but now under an angle away from the whipping, like so:

Pull the needle and thread through and prepare for the final tightning... if all went well it looks like this:

Now you make sure that little loop of the knot doesn't twist while you pull it tight and all the way on the side of the whipping and into the rope. Make sure you don't cut yourself on the twine. It really must end up like on the following photo; if not, cut it off and start over:

When you look carefully, you see the knot buried just below the surface of the rope. Now we're ready for the finishing touch. Cut the twine off where it exits the rope but leave just a couple of mm sticking out, like so:

See that? ever saw that and wondered why it sticks out there? It does so because it is the way of a true sailmaker seaman... his signature if you wish, and it makes landlubbers wonder what the frak is sticking out there and some might even be bright enough to realize it has to do with the whipping (if they would know what it's called) but they can't figure out how it got to stick out there because they are utterly clueless. If they ask (they never do) you can tell them to start by joining the sea scouts and working their way up from there, instead of buying a floating condo and act like a sailor who knows his shit :-)

Here's the end product: a properly whipped rope end with all the tools used:

ciao!
Nick & Josie.