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General Climbing Discussion

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Solo Aiding a beginners intro 15-Nov-2010 At 9:41:45 PM singersmith

Message

On 14/11/2010 Fish Boy wrote:
>Gri gri's suck when you have to pull a free move or three,

Just pay out 15 or 20 feet of slack, then free climb. Who's busting free moves out of the aiders on anything they might actually fall on?

>they are junk on wet ropes and you need to be on top of back up knots/rebelay stuff etc
>to make them nice and not self feed. All pretty simple once you've got
>it sorted I suppose.

Not great on wet ropes, deadly on icy ones [/ thousand yard stare]

>You need to pay attention to the rope going over the
>brake lever, as a fall can hold it down and make you fall a long way.
>If you are going to solo a bit and want something supersafe and redundant,
>the silent partner is the only device worth having it seems. You can put
>two biners in it, has silky smooth feeding and will catch falls in any
>orientation, something a gri gri wont do.

I frown on one biner and therefore back up my grigri (unmodified) with a clove hitch on a separate biner with both belay biners clipped through both parts of the harness; never just the belay loop unless it's backed up with supertape. 20-30 feet of slack between the clove and grigri, clove usually kept rather loose so you can pull slack through in two quick motions. Without rope weight the rope pulls through nice and smooth... My high level of paranoia recently convinced me to belay my partners with a clove backup like this.

Haven't used silent partner but it looks awesome except for the weight and the possibility of having your teeth knocked out by the thing.