John and Pat,
The lines for the whale boats are tied off at the cleat with a series of figure eights. I don't know the nautical jargon for this, but it is commonly seen in close up photos of the davits where the cleat is located. I repeated the figure eight several times until it looked right and then used a tiny drop of CA to secure it in place. Final step was to trim the end. Please let me know if you have further comments or questions.
The "knot" used to tie around a cleat is indeed called "figure of eight".
Usually the cleat will be at a very slight angle to direction that the line is running from, and the line is brought around to the side that the farthest horn of the cleat is pointing in, so that the first part of the cleat that the line touches will be the horn farthest away from where the line originates. This puts the greatest stress on the farthest point of the cleat and makes for the strongest fastening. It also allows the line to be released easier than if it was brought on the opposite side of the cleat where an over-riding line could cause it to jam.
Then it is "figure eighted" around usually not more than 3 times.
At the end of the last figure 6, the line is twisted so that instead of going on top of the other 8's, it goes underneath itself. This locks the knot so that it won't come undone no matter how bad the wind and waves get.
Most of that you can't see but the one part that CAN be seen is that it's a mistake to trim the end off once you put glue to hold the knot in place. The line should have been premeasured so that when let out to it's fullest extent, it was long enough to go from wherever the attachment point was and still have enough left to cleat.
That means that in most of the places you have lines cleated, there would be (in real life), several meters/yards of line left over after it's cleated.
This line is always coiled up into loops, and then hung over the ipper horn of the cleat, where it can be dropped off and released at a moment's notice. There are many ways of doing this, but the most common is to form all the loops about the same size, and then reach through the middle of the loop to grab the line as it comes off the cleat. This line is then pulled through towards the sailor and then looped over the top of the larger loops. The line pulled through the middle is the part that's actually used to hang the other loops over the horn of the cleat.
