Double Footrope Knot

This is the knot I used on the lifelines gate thimble side. Traditionally this form was used as the knot at the end of a rope held over the side of a ship for a sailor to get a foot hold to climb aboard... a foot rope, if you will.

The doubled version here is simple the single version with the strands led along and under the first pass of the two comprising knots, a wall and a crown.

First a wall, then a crown
tie it up, then tie it down.
-Ashley Book of Knots

New life for old lifelines

Ok, that's not true. We're scrapping our old lifelines and placing them with much more boaty looking ones made of 3 strand nylon/polyester line. One of the machine swaged terminals slipped off during a transit, luckily no one was on the foredeck when it parted.

The gates are made up of a riggers eye splice around a stainless steal thimble. After 3 full tucks I put a double footrope knot finished by seizing the strands around the standing end. The footrope knot keeps the gate eye from jamming into the stanchion and allows tension to be maintained on the rest of the lifeline. The opening end of the lifeline gate will have these spiffy bronze pelican hooks spliced onto them. To keep tension on the forward end of the gates I have tied single strand double Matthew Walker knot. I think the technical name for the know is a Double Overhand Stopper knot, but in structure, I think it could be rightly called a Matthew Walker knot tied with one lead, and then doubled. However, in that case it might be like the Fibonacci sequence in that the first number in the sequence is not the sum of itself and the previous term. So... perhaps there is no single lead Matthew Walker knot, no Fibonacci sequence, and no damn cat, and no damn cradle.

And here is what one of the finished gates looks like.