Tie Knots - The Poll Hitch and the Turqouise Turtle

Chris Conrad: Hi, my name is Chris Conrad. I am an Assistant Scoutmaster with Troop 165 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Today we are learning everyday knots and I have two binding knots that I just love. The first one is called the pole hitch.

Now, here we have a whole bunch of pieces of bamboo that need to be bound up so that they can be transported. The pole hitch is a very simple knot. We start off with a cord of about six feet in length and I am going to lay this out on the ground, in a S or Z pattern. Now, the other ends of these poles are already bound, so I am going to simply lay this end of all the poles across my Z pattern and then I take one of the working ends, wrap it across and bring it up through the loop.

Now, take the other end, take it across and take it up through the other loop. Now, we can pull the ends of these and shake our poles a little bit to get them to be bound, nice and tight and I am going to finish this knot with a standard shoelace bow and our poles are ready to transport.

The next knot we are going to learn is called the Turquoise turtle and that is actually a very interesting name for a knot. The history of the knot is that there were seen being tied in a small gift shop in London where they would use this knot to tie up packages. I like to use this knot as an alternate for the shoelace knot. It holds better than a shoelace knot and comes untied easier than a double knot.

So, let us begin, now we begin just like a shoelace knot does with an overhand knot and I am going to create two loops from the working ends and essentially tie another overhand knots with those two loops. Now, if I was to pull this tight, I would have a standard shoelace knot, but instead what I will do is I will take my loops, crave my overhand and instead of pulling it tight, I am going to take one of the loops and one of the ends back through the hole again and then I will pull the loops tight.

Now, this knot forms two distinctive ridges on the top, if pulled tight, it is almost as tight as the double knot and yet comes apart as easily as single shoelace knot. Now, the next two knots we are going to learn are connecting knots, which allows to put two pieces of cord together.