Cowboy bowline so easily pushed back by accident. However, there is no documentation to confirm this claim, and some Dutch knot tyers outright deny it. Another piece of unverified lore is that it is called a winter bowline because the exposed working end on the outside would blow in the wind and prevent it from freezing to the loop on ships in the north Atlantic during winter. (This suggests that the standard bowline would be the summer bowline.) "The Ashley Book of Knots" states that it is "distinctly inferior" to the standard bowline because of its similarity to the left-hand sheet bend.
Double bowline is easier to untie after being weighted in a fall, and so is used by sport climbers who take multiple lead falls and then have trouble untying their figure eights. The disadvantages of the double bowline are that it is less secure than a figure eight knot, takes longer to tie, and is not as easy to check. Unlike the figure eight, there are many variations of the bowline, with ambiguous names, and some are not safe for climbing. The Bowline on a bight, when re-threaded instead of being tied on a bight, can also be used for tying into