World’s “MOST USEFUL” Knot! Easy Bowline tutorial

Known as the king of knots .

The bowline is one of the most useful and versatile knots .

You could learn along with being extremely easy to undo .

Even after tension has been put on it , I find it to be one of the most practical knots out there .

Some common uses for this knot include creating a secure loop at the end of your line .

It's often used to string up a tarp , secure your tents , rain flies , go around a tree or even around the handle of a bag or a carabiner and getting more creative .

You could actually turn it into a handle , it's or even a carabiner itself or you could even wrap the whole thing around your object , slip the free end through and now it becomes a sort of cinching knot .

So this knot is really versatile and I'll share with you all my favorite ways to use it .

But first , here's how to tie it .

For the first step .

We're going to visualize turning the keys to a car because we're facing a tree .

We're going to do the motion of turning a car off .

See this motion here , it's like the keys , turning which creates your loop .

Now , take your free end and go up through the loop around the back side of that standing line and back down through the loop .

And to tighten , you just pull all the ends and you have your bow in the knot should look like this with that definitive U shaped wrap there , that tag end will be inside the loop and some people will tie a safety knot with it for added security .

Now , if you accidentally wrap around the wrong line , it could turn out like this , the knot itself looks the same , but it's wrapped around the loop end and not the tension end where it's supposed to be fear though , if you've accidentally tied this and you've actually tied the anti bowline knot , which is just as strong and arguably even more secure than the original bowline to tie it a little bit faster .

You could keep the free end in your hand as you go through that wrist motion of the car turning off and it's already in position to be wrapped around and back underneath just like normal while it's great to learn a knot in a single direction .

It's important to remember that when that knot flips or you're tying it away from you versus towards you , that technique is going to change a little bit and that's one thing I personally struggled with tying a knot facing myself or facing the other way .

How exactly do you remember how to do each knot .

Well , what helped me was using association and various techniques that I could stick to just like this , for instance , tying around a backpack or a tent peg where the object is closer to us .

And then that tension line is farther away from us .

And so depending on where the object is , that not itself is going to be turned around and facing the opposite way .

So initially , there was that tree in front of us , so we had to turn the car keys off .

But now we have open space in front of us so we can turn the car keys on .

And with that wrist motion , we're going to use it on our standing line to create the loop there .

Now , the rest of the steps are pretty much the same and there's even an old saying to help you remember this part , it goes like this .

The rabbit comes up through the hole , runs around the back side of the tree and back down into its hole .

Now , as I mentioned earlier , here are a few more practical ways in which to use the bow line .

One of them is simply to connect two lengths of rope together and you could do this in a number of different ways .

One of them actually being tying a whole bow line attached to the other bow line connecting both ropes or tying a simple sheet bend or square knot with a safety which are really easy and quick to tie .

Now , if you don't know how to do any of these , I have dedicated videos and I'll just put those in the description box below .

And now for one of my favorite ways to use this knot is when you need to have adjustable tension on your rope , you could combine this with a knot called the Marlin Spike .

Basically , you go around your object and wherever you want your line to tighten , you put a stick in there and it'll lock it completely in place .

And if you want to readjust , you could just slide that Marlin spike along the rope or you could take that stick out completely and readjust that way .

Thank you , everyone for watching .

I'm DJ with the bare essentials .