Sorry, I lost the attribution to this

FWIW, bowline failures are quite rare - while its often
discussed few people can offer a recent example


But I saw a bowline failure last weekend! My knife lanyard is tied with a
duobled figure-8 knot to the knife, and the other end is left straight.
When rigging down our ship, I tied the other end to a loop in my pocket
with a bowline. I kept the knife in my jacket pocket (folded) on my right
side, and lanyard was tied to an upper pocket on the left. When ever I
needed the knife, I could just grab the lanyard and yank it out of the
pocket. This produced a load pattern with the line slack most of the time,
with some hard pulls in between. After about two hours I suddenly realised
that the bowline had come undone. The line was regular white flag line,
double-braided, about 3mm thick.

I don't know the name of the improved bowline I used for reattaching the
lanyard, but that held for the rest of the day. (googling shows a water
bowline that looks quite much like what I did)


- Heikki