A pocket full of knots.

Step 6 The Bowline

The bowline is a knot for making a usable loop that does not tighten when you pull on it - this is not a noose.

Near the end you want the loop, make a small loop by twisting part of the line in your hand.

Thread the end of the line up through the loop, round the back of the line, and back down the small loop.

Look at the photos to check the orientation of the loops - if you go through them from the wrong side, the whole knot will fall apart.

Comments

[hjjusa]

On the Bowline, when I was a ScoutMaster in Las Cruces NM, I was fooling around with a piece of rope. I tied a slip knot and stuck the loose end through and slipped the knot and Voila, a Bowline. I showed this to another SM and we went round and round about whether it was a Boline or not. Fast forward 10 years I was SM in another town, I was looking through a knot book and ran across the very same knot. It is called an Eskimo Bowline.

[brdavid]

there are 4 types of "Bowlines" but 2 classes! the bowline, the left handed bowline AKA: The Dutch Marine Bowline, The Cowboy Bowline, the Working end of the knot is on the outside of the look where as the working end of the Bowline is on the inside of the loop, all fall in the first class, let us call normal. The second class is harder to explain. the last loop(bright) ties around the working end and not around the standing end of the rope, thus again you will have two versions of this knot, one with the working end inside of the main loop and the other outside of the main loop. here is a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_bowline 

[Kiteman]

It's amazing the number of knots there are. It sometimes seems that almost any tangle of string has a nautical name...