Catharpin is a

nautical Seamanship is the art, knowledge and competence of operating a ship, boat or other craft on water. The'' Oxford Dictionary'' states that seamanship is "The skill, techniques, or practice of handling a ship or boat at sea." It involves topics ...

term, which is often pronounced ''cat-harping''. It describes one of the short ropes or iron clamps used to brace in the

shrouds Shroud usually refers to an item, such as a cloth, that covers or protects some other object. The term is most often used in reference to '' burial sheets'', mound shroud, grave clothes, winding-cloths or winding-sheets, such as the famous S ...

toward the masts so as to give a freer sweep to the

yard The yard (symbol: yd) is an English unit of length in both the British imperial and US customary systems of measurement equalling 3 feet or 36 inches. Since 1959 it has been by international agreement standardized as exactly ...

s. The expression has been borrowed to refer to short lashings which hold halyards away from the masts of sailing yachts by tying to adjacent shrouds so as to prevent noise and fraying by the wind. Example from ''Two Years Before the Mast'' by Richard Henry Dana: "All the hides, too, that came down in the boats were soaked with water, and unfit to put below, so that we were obliged to trice them up to dry, in the intervals of sunshine or wind, upon all parts of the vessel . . . The rail, fore and aft, the windlass, capstan, the sides of the ship, and every vacant place on deck, were covered with wet hides, on the least sign of an interval for drying. Our ship was nothing but a mass of hides, from the cat-harpins to the water's edge, and from the jib-boom-end to the

taffrail In naval architecture, a taffrail is the handrail around the open deck area toward the stern of a ship or boat. The rear deck of a ship is often called the afterdeck or poop deck. Not all ships have an afterdeck or poop deck. Sometimes taffrail r ...

."The Project Gutenberg Etext of ''Two Years Before the Mast'' by Richard Henry Dana (1840)

References

Sailing rigs and rigging {{navy-stub