BEHOLD! The Monkey’s Fist!

Alright, so the boy and his buddies weren’t the only ones bit by the knot tying bug the other night.

I first saw this knot during our trip to Battleship Cove last year. One of the other Dad’s pointed it out because of the name. It was just the sort of thing to stick with me.

So after the meeting the other night, one of the Dad’s mentioned that he had a book on knots and would be happy to lend it to me so I could learn some other interesting, useful knots. I figured he’d bring it along to the next meeting, or even forget about it. As it turned out, he dropped it off in my mailbox yesterday.

Naturally, the first thing I looked for was the monkey’s fist knot and to my delight, there it was. And to my surprise, it looked relatively easy form. The process is a 3 series of loops wrapped around each other with the sole trick being in the transition from on set of loops to the next. So I set about trying to accomplish it with a piece of shoelace I had, but had no success because the shoe lace is so soft and pliable.

Fortunately, I had the twine from the other night which was much better suited to the task. Turns out there are two difficulties with completing the monkey’s fist knot: the first is the knot has to be tightened, which requires drawing all the slack through all the loops in the knot; the second is trying to keep all of the loops neatly ordered during that tightening phase. Still, when it’s done there’s a nice sense of satisfaction. It’s an interesting looking knot.

Here’s the wiki page for it. I can confirm the weighting of the rope and being able to use it to aid in tossing. The book I used ends the section by noting that the monkey’s fist can consist of sets of loops of 3, 4 or even 5 and then suggesting that a fun pasttime might be to successfully embed a 3-looper inside a 4-looper inside a 5-looper. I don’t know how much rope that would take up, but it might indeed be an interesting way to spend some time…