There has been more than one long mortise wedged with some other piece of wood.

I've seen this:



And when it happened to me, we followed that idea:



In the windlass frame, I laid out and cut the mortise wrong.
So I created a wedge piece and had a carver make it into the shape of an "eye" so that we could say the "one eyed timber god was watching us".....

So that we wouldn't make that mistake again....

Jim Rogers