I had claimed that climbers are knot
users, so poor knot tyers, but I had NOT claimed that they are no-knot-tyers at all !
In particular, I think that Alpineer s idea, at least as far as I am able to understand it, is
very interesting :
Utilize a climbing friction hitch as the "nipping structure" ( the knot tied on the Standing Part before the eye )
of a secure bowline - in place of the single nipping loop of the common ( Standard or "Eskimo") bowline.
His "
Tresse" series of bowlines are inspired by the
Valdotain Tress hitch ( VT) used by arborists (3).
I do not know enough things about the various climbing friction hitches ( and I had NEVER used one...), so I can not evaluate which of all those knots is more suitable to do this job. I had seen that the recently presented "coiled S.Part"
Tresse bowline, where the oblique element connecting the first and the last wraps runs outside the helical "nipping tube", is a fine knot (1) - but only because, almost by accident, and while I was hunting something else, I had met the
multi-coil Clove hitch (2).
Who knows what one can do, if he uses another gripping hitch... The interested reader may start from a blind imitation of one climbing hitch (4), and then proceed further, and simplify it as much as possible ( because he always can : climbing hitches involve elements which are needed only in the case of a slide-and-grip self-locking knot ).
Having said that, I also want to repeat that a decent
secure bowline, IMHO, should involve a double "collar structure" as well. If, for such a structure, we can also utilize elements coming from the field of climbing friction hitches, is something we should examine further. For my part, I had only attempted to add a
rat-tail-stopper-like cross-gartered (braided)
double collar, on "top" of a common bowline (5).
1.
http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=5357.msg36131#msg36131 http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=5357.msg36416#msg364162.
http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=3794.msg22277#msg222773.
http://storrick.cnc.net/VerticalDevicesPage/Ascender/KnotPages/KnotVT.html4.
http://storrick.cnc.net/VerticalDevicesPage/Ascender/AscenderKnots.html5.
http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=4283.msg35800#msg35800
