Whether you’re a canoeist or a kayaker or both, you’re bound to find plenty of uses for rope. At a minimum, every boat should be fitted with a bow line (call it a towline or painter if you prefer). Stern lines are a good idea, as well. And what’s the easiest way to attach these essential lines? With knots, of course — preferably bowlines. Once you’ve fixed a couple of lines in place on your boat, one fore and the other aft, you’ll be much better prepared to meet the challenges of traveling over water. You can line down through a tricky drop or track upstream against the sweep of the current. You’ll also find it easier to recover your boat in the event of a capsize. But rope has many more uses. If you stow gear inside your boat — and what paddler doesn’t? — you’ll want to tie it down. You’ll also need to lash float bags firmly in place anywhere they’re not constrained by decks. If you don’t, your flotation will just do what comes naturally as soon as the gunwales dip below the waterline: float free. Then your boat will be left to swim (or sink) on its own. Rope is useful off the water, too. At day’s end, you’ll need to make your boat fast to your car’s roof rack before you head home. And if you store your boat outside, you’ll want tie‑downs to keep it from blowing away the first time the wind rises above a stiff breeze.

The bottom line? Rope is valuable stuff. I learned this early, even before I started running rivers, when my mountain hikes took me off the trails and up steeper and steeper slopes. Before long, I found my life hanging — well, not by a thread, exactly, but by a rope. Of course, I didn’t actually hang from the rope very often. Thankfully. But my rope was my constant companion on rock faces and frozen waterfalls, always ready to help me out in time of need. We spent a lot of time together, my rope and I, and as our acquaintance deepened, my knowledge of knots and hitches and their uses grew apace. Beginning with Lesson Number One: On a mountain, when your fingers are numb with cold and your brain is addled by exhaustion, simple is good. And one of the simplest tools in the climber’s bag of tricks is the prusik hitch, named after its putative inventor, Austrian mountaineer Karl Prusik. The name lost its capital “P” somewhere along the line, however. It often loses the “hitch,” too. In any case, a prusik — with or without the accompanying hitch — is little more than a loop of cord that’s wrapped around a host rope (or sometimes two ropes, or even something else altogether, like a branch). Unweighted, the prusik slides more or less freely along its host. Once under tension, however, it holds fast.

I’ll show you how to tie one in just a minute. First, though, here’s what the prusik looks like:

 

 
In the left photo, I’ve tied a prusik hitch around a quarter‑inch laid nylon line. On the right, the hitch encompasses both the laid line and a length of braided polypropylene. Now let’s look at one of the most important ways prusiks are used in whitewater rescue… Read more…

 
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