Video

How to Tie a Bowline Knot

San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

Transcript

Hello! My name is Ranger Chris and what I’m going to do today is show you how to do some knotwork. Some basic skills that sailors would use on long voyages or honestly any kind of voyage. They would use this skillset that is always absolutely useful and necessary. And so what I thought I’d do is show you how to tie a bowline, which is a loop kind of knot. It’s one of the most useful ones out there. It’s pretty easy to tie. Easy to untie. And it doesn’t accidentally undo itself, so it’s a great knot for reliability, too. I’ve got one here in front of me. I thought I would start with this to show you what it looks like from the beginning. Do not worry though- I'm going to do one in kind of slow motion so that you can see every element of it. It’s not too complicated. But I do want to point out that you can see the basic loop right here. The knot is right there. So, in order to show this knot to you, what I’m first going to do is untie it and now I’ve kind of got the knot right-side-up here, so I’m going to turn it over. Push this loop to loosen the whole thing up, and then it just kind of comes undone pretty easily. And now, I’ve got my straight piece of rope. Although, you could use string or anything that is rope-like for this. You really don’t need to- shoestrings would be absolutely fine. Or if you've got a piece of rope, go for it. But you do want to start with it out straight like this. And before I actually start tying it, let me briefly say something about, you know the stories that you often hear with knots, and there is one that goes with this. It’s great for teaching because it gives you can idea of what to visualize as you’re going through the steps of tying this knot. For the bowline, as it’s pronounced, it’s spelled like bow-line, but, like almost everything else, once it comes onboard a ship they have their own pronunciation for it. They pronounce it “bowlin”. The story for the bowline, however, is about a rabbit. The idea of a rabbit coming up and out through its rabbit hole and goes around a nearby tree, but then it sees something that gets it scared and it heads right back down into the rabbit hole again. So that’s out story and we’re going to start with our rabbit hole itself. And the rabbit hole is pretty easy to line up. It’s just basically making a circle out of the rope. What you want to do is circle it around, just like that. I’m going to do it one more time here. Alright. You take the line and circle it so it’s right on top. And there is your rabbit hole. This piece of the rope- the little end piece here. Thats going to be our rabbit and what you want to do is have it come up and through the rabbit hole. So that it looks like this, alright? So you’ve got your rabbit hole. You’ve got the rabbit coming up through the rabbit hole. Now it’s going to go around the tree, okay. This part here is the tree. So, the rabbit’s going to go around that tree, but then it sees something and get’s scared and goes right back down into the rabbit hole. Now, if you ever get confused because it gets all jumbled up or something like that, then all you have to do is look for the place the rabbit’s coming up and out of the hole, which in this case is right here and then you go right back in the same spot. And at that point, you’re pretty much finished with your knot. You just got to  pull the knot tight and you’re good to go.

Description

How to Tie a Bowline Know with Ranger Chris.

Duration

5 minutes, 41 seconds

Copyright and Usage Info