Chris Conrad: Hi my name is Chris Conrad. I am an Assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 165 in Fredericksburg, Virginia and today I am teaching basic everyday knots that can be used for a variety of activities. Right now I am going to teach two stopper knots, the overhand knot and the figure-eight knots and then I will teach you the knute hitch. So, let us start with the stopper knots.

Now, a stopper knot is basically a bulky knot that can be used temporarily to close the end of a piece of cord like this one and the overhand knot is actually the simplest knot there is. It is simply taking the end of the cord and looping it through and pulling it tight like that. Now, stopper knots can also be used for holding a line from going through a pulley or a blocking tackle of system and if you need a slightly bigger stopper knot, we will use the figure-eight and a figure-eight goes like this. We lay the line and make a loop, come under the standing part and then we take our working end and dive back down through the loop and what we will do is we will work this line down, taking all the fleck out of the knot until we get the figure-eight. This is a slightly bulkier knot and the figure-eight will be seeing a lot of later as we use it for a loop and a bend.

In the next knot, we are going to learn is the knute hitch. It is a very simple knot. We have a small shelter here, they were trying to tie down and we need an anchor to run through this grommet. Now, I have already tied a figure-eight knot at the end of this line and all we are going to do is we are going to take a small loop on the working end of this cord pass it up through the grommet and then we are going to take our figure-eight and pass that through the loop.

This is very simple knot, easy for kids to learn and so if you need to tie down a shelter or tarp of some kind, the knute hitch is perfect and I will use my taut-line hitch to tighten this up. Perfect, next we will learn some binding knots.