How To Tie a Bowline Knot Diagram

Learn three different ways to tie a bowline, the King of Knots. We will show you how to tie a bowline knot diagram.

By Jim Sullivan
Updated on August 23, 2022
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by AdobeStock/carol_anne

Learn three different ways to tie a bowline, the King of Knots. We will show you how to tie a bowline knot diagram.

The bowline (pronounced bo-lin) is the single most important knot for all outdoors people, on land or ashore. Its job is to make a loop at the end of a rope. This allows you to put your rope to use by attaching it to an object such as a hook, a post, or even another rope. The bowline is traditionally preferred to the many other possible loop knots because it is secure, it won’t come untied, it is easy to tie under difficult conditions, and it is easy to untie — a requirement of good knots.

The bowline is always one of the first knots taught. Once learned, it serves as a basis for understanding many other important knots. But surprisingly few people know how to tie a bowline — and even fewer can make reliable use of it in the field. This is often because your physical orientation to a rope can be different in the field than it was when you learned the knot while sitting in a comfortable chair with a knot book open in your lap and a clean, supple length of practice cord in your hand. In the field, you may suddenly find yourself having to tie it in stiff material, upside down, with freezing fingers, in the dark, or around the object rather than “in hand.”

Think of the bowline simply as an interlocking hitch and loop. Perhaps a dozen different methods have evolved to tie it under all conditions, but you need only three of them to tie your way out of most situations. Once you learn to visualize the knot, you won’t need to follow the precise directions given here or anywhere else. Half the fun of tying knots is developing your own style.

Instructional Bowline

Although a somewhat pedestrian version, this is often the first method taught because it so clearly illustrates the structure. In this method you form the hitch first, the loop second.

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