The Complete Rigger's Apprentice: Tools and Techniques for Modern and Traditional Rigging

Combining and updating the renowned Rigger's Apprentice and Rigger's Locker, meets the changing face of modern materials and technology while remaining true to rigging's best traditional principles and practices. It's much more than a knot book, though the knots a sailor needs are all here. It's a book for sailors who want the satisfaction and hard-cash savings of stepping their own masts, inspecting and maintaining their own rigs, and turning their own tailsplices and wire eyesplices. It is for boatowners who want to replace an entire gang of rigging themselves--measuring, choosing appropriate wire, turning soft eyes, leathering, and serving. It is for bluewater voyagers who want to feel secure in the knowledge that, should a shroud carry away far at sea, they will be able to repair it.

The Complete Rigger's Apprentice is also a free-roaming collection of useful ideas and tips on everything from supplementing winches with block and tackle, to rigging snubbers at anchor, to using pantyhose for an emergency fanbelt. In short, it's the definitive book on the art of rigging, written by its most entertaining practitioner.

Writer-rigger Brion Toss became obsessed with knots in the late 1960s, a preoccupation that led him to sailing and rigging. He has rigged everything from tiny daysailers to huge square-riggers. Equally at home with modern or traditional rigging, Toss continues to pursue the challenge of designing The Ideal Rig--that unique combination of details best suited to a particular boat and its particular crew. When not writing or lecturing about knots and rigging, he can be found at work at Brion Toss Rigging, his shop in Port Townsend, Washington.

Robert Shetterly lives and works in Brooksville, Maine. He got hooked on drawing at Harvard University and later taught in a one-room schoolhouse, dug clams, and worked in a fish factory to support his habit. In 1980, he left an art editor position at Farmstead Magazine to become a full-time freelance illustrator. He has illustrated many books, and he continues to create what he calls his own "peculiar drawings."