You can look up knots by name on the interweb. Much better than any photo I could supply.
I tend to use a "buntline hitch" when tying the mainsheet to the becket, but you could also use a "halyard hitch". Both are very compact knots that are perfect for this application. I find bowlines unnecessarily bulky, and in some applications the fact that you "lose" the last 2-3" due to the size of the loop can make a difference.
A great Christmas gift is either Ashley's "Ashley's Book of Knots" or, more modern and less full of amusing and irrelevant detail, any of Gregory Budworth's books. He's done several and many cover a number of knots useful to sailing, although you never know when you might use something different.
My boat has 3 or 4 different knots that aren't the standard figure eight or bowline, something that drives (some of) my crew to distraction. The better sailors have learned all of these by now, and some have retaliated by doing fancy stopper knots (not simple figure
. All in good fun.
Cut a piece off two differently colored ropes and superglue them together, so you have one with two differently colored ends. That makes a great tool for practicing knots as you can better follow the turns than using a single rope of uniform color.
Here are the knots I'm using:
- Bowline -- to attach painter to bow eye
- Figure Eight -- as stopper knot
- Buntline Hitch -- to tie main to becket and spinnaker halyard to spinnaker
- Sheet bend -- modified version, for tying the two ends of the traveler
- Clove hitch -- to tie a fender to the shrouds
- Luggage tag hitch (with toggle) -- to tie main halyard to headboard
- Anchor hitch -- once in a blue moon when I anchor
- Rolling hitch (tautline hitch) -- I use it to attach a bungee to to the tail of the outhaul to keep it flat next to the boom
- Butterfly hitch -- to make a loop in the middle of a line to tie something to - occasional use
- Round turn and two half hitches -- occasional uses, tying to a ring
- Trucker's hitch -- to secure a load