The standard ratcheting knot is the rolling hitch, although several people on this thread mentioned potentially better knots for this application. My general tr

The standard ratcheting knot is the rolling hitch, although several people on this thread mentioned potentially better knots for this application. My general trick is to use rolling hitches together with the bow-and-arrow technique. The concept behind bow-and-arrow is simple -- if you pull on a segment of rope perpendicular to the rope, it gets tighter. If I'm tying something to my roof rack, I'll get is as tight as I can going around a few times with a rolling hitch. Then I'll get a piece of rope to pull on that one. How you do that depends on domain.