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Near Miss - Abseiling on tail of ropes. 1-Feb-2016 At 7:46:37 AM Dr Nick

Message

On 31/01/2016 jakob wrote:

>The second lesson I have learned is that prussiks are a pretty damn good
>defence against abseiling off the rope. If I had a prussik and my brake
>hand felt the rope slip through, I possibly would have caught it with my
>prussik hand, letting the prussik do its job. Without a prussik there's
>less opportunity to catch it. * I did have knots in the end of the main
>lines, though in this situation it wouldn't have helped me.

I have a vague memory that someone (Petzl?) tested this and found that most of the time the prusik (or shunt, or whatever) will be off the end of the rope before you realise bad things are happening. While it's not necessarily a bad thing to use, it may be lulling you into a false sense of security. Were you going to make a similar comment as a footnote with the asterisk there?

The lesson you glossed over is the one that I think is more important - your routine has to include at least a double check, and this gets more critical the longer you've been climbing - just cause you didn't stuff up in the last 10+ years doesn't make you infallible.

Glad you're OK, and thanks for sharing a way of stuffing up I hadn't heard before.