The Versatile Marline Spike Hitch

Description

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

I'll show you a really simple way to toggle your equipment off of a tree including your pack just got a length of cordage here about six-foot and I've got a bowline knot tied in one side just a stop not tied in the other I take that around the tree run it through that bowline simply climb the rope grab it climb the rope let's take a toggle in there and now I've created a marlinespike hitch with the toggle and I can now hang my backpack off the tree at any comfortable height I want to be able to work for my pack and still keep it off the ground you know I'm a really big fan of simple everything I do I like to keep it as simple as possible so it's quick and easy easy to retrieve and I keep a couple of prusik loops Christic loops on my ridgeline which I just tie with that standard bowline knot trucker's hitch that I've always used and I keep a couple toggles on there you wouldn't necessarily have to keep these toggles on there if you wanted to not take up that room in your pack but a couple toggles in your wound cordage that you've already got hanged up anyway don't take up that much room in your pack and then you've always got the toggle so now I can just slide this up and down to put my tarp on here or my tent or wherever I'm using with this ridgeline to adjust it where I want it generally when I pack my pack I like you use a mentality of first outlast in which means that when I'm packing up my pack from the bottom up the things that I'm going to use first or most likely to be used are gonna be at the top of my pack so I don't have to fish around for so my tarp and a staking material extra rope that I have he's always writing the top of my pack so as soon as I stop and throw my ridgeline up which is usually kept in this bag I throw my ridgeline up I've got my tarp and any staking that I need right accessible to me I pop my pack without taking anything else out and I can quickly close my pack if the weather should turn foul or I'm sitting up in the rain now I generally will keep a couple of pieces of rope in that steak bag like I said it'll usually be Bank line as I like using Bank line for this kind of stuff for tie outs orange paracord is just as good so you can see it at night I keep a just a prusik loop I'm excuse me a bowline loop in one end stop not in the other just like I do with that utility rope that I carry in my pocket so that I can then just take that Hank and walk away from the tarp with it just set my stake okay let's talk about another way to use this marlinespike hitch in camp because I believe the more you can use a knot the less things you have to know around camp to get the same jobs done what we did here with this tarp line is we put a prusik loop on here and a prosecute is pretty simple to create we're gonna talk about that in just a minute and then I just put a larks head around this toggle so let's forgo that for a minute let's move that out of the way let's take another piece of line here again I'm just going to tie a stop knot in both ends of it for the time being okay and it's just a piece of 36 Bank line it's probably a foot long and I'm going to come up here on the line and the way you tie that prosecute is by taking a bite over the line just like you would if you were making a larks head knot so you pull that over the line if you pull it through one time you've created a larks head knot and there's a lot of variations I can show you of this that are really cool too if you actually take that loop that you've got right there and turn it over one time into a figure of eight and pull the line back through it it creates a self tightening knot because it creates on this backside you've got a large set on the top and on the backside here it's going to create a clove hitch what that won't do for you is it won't keep it from sliding up and down the line but it does make something that's very permanent if you're trying to tighten something around the toggle you can use that method and it will be pretty permanent so back to our project what we're going to do is were going to come back here do the same thing with the loop over we're going to pull through and that would be our larks head so what we're going to do is we're going to go through that loop two more times with both of those lines and that's going to create that prusik and that will give us something that will tighten down the line as we pull side to side tension on it now we've got one side that's short on this thing and one side is a lot longer when address our knot up a little bit here just to make sure everything's neat and tidy on the line the only gonna have to do this one time and now we've got something that we pull side to side pressure on it's not going to move but now I've got this long line hanging down here and now I can just take and make a mini knot of that marlinespike and put that through my toggle I can come down here take this one out slide it down the line out of the way put this one through that we just put on the marlinespike hitch and accomplish exactly the same thing with that that we did set up the other way and now we've used that marlinespike itch twice in this camp ok another way to use that marlinespike hitch is with our hammock we've got our tree strap here that goes around the tree we've got a fairly large toggle and all we're gonna do is create that same marlinespike hitch which again I just take my hand and turn it upside down the line pick that line up and wrap it around and climb the line and pull a loop through and when I pull that down I now have a marlinespike hitch in that line and if my hammock employs something like Whoopie slings which mine does on this hammock gear.com hammock I can then put that through here and along as the tension is on the not it's not spread across the toggle I can tighten everything up to where I need to be and put a lot of tension on that dude and now it's not gonna be a problem for me to use this as part of my hammock system is this as safe as something like a carabiner in that same location in that same knot probably not as safe but you don't have to carry the carabiners this way and if you get a good stout toggle and you make sure that your line is pulling against the knot here instead of pulling against the toggle itself you're gonna be in good shape so that's three ways we've used that same knot throughout this camp okay one more way that we can use this same knot is to put our stakes in the ground stake our tarp what we're gonna do is come up here grab a marlinespike catch all we're doing is putting the toggle through there the stake is just a toggle once we pull down on it it's not going anywhere figure out where we want that stake to go in the ground and shove it in the great thing about that is when we were to pull it out all we have to do is slide that thing down the stake and it pops right out so if I go from a stake in the ground situation to tying it to a tree to fly my tarp it's very very simple to do that using this system and I don't have to untie any knots and that is really the beauty of that Marlinspike itch

okay the last thing we're going to use this knot for today is we're going to use it to hang our pot over the fire we have created a tripod here using a tripod lash and we've got some tail left over that we can wrap around one of the top pieces if it's too long so that we can adjust the height of our pot up and down on the fire now we have to attach this toggle to the line how do we do that again we just make a little mini more line spike hitch in there tighten that dude down and we can pull it all the way down to the end of that line if we don't want any tail hanging down there easy enough we can kind of adjust that and pull it up just like that

I got a couple of knots right there then I'll hold things really good now I've got a good steady place to hang my pot over the fire and if I need to adjust the height it's easy enough to just take a couple wraps up or down to adjust the height to that spot hang it over my cook fire okay guys well we just talked about five different things we could use the same knot for throughout setting up a simple camp any knot you can have that much versatility with is absolutely worth learning I appreciate you joining me today for this video I appreciate everything you do for our school for our family and for our business for all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and friends and I'll be back to another video as soon as I can guys thanks