The sailor’s best friend is an ancient bit of technology
What is the single aid to sailing you would least like to be without on the water? I’m going to rule the compass out of consideration, but everything else is fair game. Your trusty rigging knife? GPS? Self-tailing winches? A bucket (to be transformed into the world’s most effective bilge pump when put in the hands of a frightened sailor)? A life vest? Your Jimmy Buffett CD collection?
My answer is the bowline. Yes, the knot.
I love the new technology of sailing—the way our boats, rigs and sails are built, the clever gear, the whiz-bang electronics—but some of the most useful technology on the boat is old tech and low tech: a knot that can attach a line to anything, that can be tied in a few seconds, that won’t slip or come undone until you want it to and then it always does.
In fact, the bowline is probably the oldest technology on our boats. It has been around for hundreds of years. An author named John Smith described it in the book Seaman’s Grammar in 1627. A variation of the bowline is said to have been found in an excavation of the ship that took the mummified pharaoh Cheops on his final journey.
Oddly, this best of all sailing knots seems to get more lavish praise outside of sailing than it does in our world. Mountain climbing writers call it “the king of knots.” An author of riding manuals anoints the bowline the best equestrian knot because it is “impossible to loosen,” even when shaken by a skittish horse. If nothing else, this proves the knot’s versatility—one of the reasons we sailors like it is because no matter how much strain you’ve put on a bowline, you can loosen it.
I’m a little miffed that the ultimate authority on knots for sailors, Clifford W. Ashley, author of the monumental reference The Ashley Book of Knots, does not flatly declare the bowline the best sailor’s knot among the 2,000 knots included in his book. Instead he is smitten by the carrick bend, which he declares to be “the nearest thing we have to the perfect bend.” He goes on to say it is easy to tie, doesn’t slip, cannot jam and is easily untied, and adds that it is symmetrical. Except for the symmetrical part (only a knot nut could care about that), everything he praises in the carrick bend is found in the bowline. The bowline is not a bend, of course, but it can be used to tie two lines together as reliably as a carrick bend. The carrick bend, alas, is also known as the sailor’s knot, which is not fair. If any knot deserves that honor, it’s the bowline.
Where there are boats, the bowline is ubiquitous. At least four nationalities lay claim to their own versions of it; there are Portuguese, Spanish, French and Dutch bowlines. There are at least four ways to tie the classic, generic bowline. As a wee lad, I learned to pass the end of the line through a loop, around the standing part of the line and back through he loop. This is the standard rabbit method, though my mentor, to his everlasting credit, did not make me recite the following verse while doing this: “The rabbit comes out of the hole, round the tree and back down the hole again.”
There is also what is called the jedi or lightning method: Make a slip knot and pull the end of the line through and you should have a bowline. Then there is the one-handed bowline, sometimes referred to as the dragon, which is basically the rabbit method for people with advanced dexterity. It is chiefly useful for showing off. The final method is the bowline in a bight, a rewarding knot to tie that magically appears out of an overhand knot in the middle of a line. Among other uses, this variant of the bowline can be tied to make a really uncomfortable bosun’s chair.
Hardware makers have been trying to improve on the bowline for a long time, which is why there are so many variations of snapshackles on the market. Still, I don’t think there’s a better way to attach a sheet to a genoa than by tying a tidy, short-looped bowline. A bowline can be tied as fast as one of the special genoa shackles can be clipped shut, it’s more secure, won’t damage any part of the boat or its crew during tacks and costs nothing. For asymmetrical spinnakers that have to be pulled around the headstay to jibe, shackles on sheets add to the friction. A bowline doesn’t. Sailors who go aloft in bosun’s chairs should know enough not to trust the snapshackle at the end of the halyard and tie a bowline instead. While eyesplices are satisfying to make and pretty to look at, a bowline will do the job whenever a loop is needed. It is true that, unlike a splice, the knot weakens the line a bit, but today’s high-tech rope is so formidable that no one has to lose sleep over its strength.
If I could have only one type of knot aboard a boat, it would of course be the bowline. Several others are useful, however. Here are my choices in order of need:
The clove hitch. This is best knot for tying mooring lines to docks, hanging fenders and a plethora of other uses, and you can tie it by simply dropping two loops over a bollard or post, which landlubbers often find impressive.
The rolling hitch. You need this knot, which won’t slip when tied around another line and pulled the right direction, to deal with a sheet override on a winch. When used in a race to relieve pressure on a snarled sheet, it is often the difference between disaster and a close call.
The stopper knot. Not to be confused with a figure eight knot, bulky but handsome stoppers should be tied at the end of halyards with about eight inches of line left behind them, so that when the halyard, perhaps attached to a gyrating spinnaker, tries to fly out of the mast and the stopper slams against the rope clutch, there is something to grab onto.
As for the figure eight, it’s banned on our boat to discourage people who exhibit the compulsion to tie knots (invariably a figure eight) at the ends of genoa and spinnaker sheets—the last place in the world there should be a knot.
It’s good to know a few knots, but never forget that, as wise climbers say, the bowline is king.
And just why is this royal knot called the bowline? One source makes the dubious claim that it was so named because it was used to attach a line from the bow to a sail on square-riggers. That seems a might too convenient to me. It’s just as likely it was named after the handy sailor who invented it, who might have been Will Boleyn, who perhaps changed his name to Bowline after his sister got in trouble fooling around with Henry VIII. It’s too bad we really don’t know who invented the bowline. Few people have done more
for sailing.
