erin85 wrote:Having been caving in France a lot recently, I can tell you that almost no one uses locking biners to connect their ascender to their long cowstail. I have never seen it done, ever. It's because you use both cowstails very frequently, for a lot of moves that are not unknown but fairly exotic to the American crowd, and if they lock, it takes too long to manipulate them. Usually the only locking biner in the whole system is the one connecting the descender to the harness. When doing vires (horizontal traverse), you basically have one point of contact the majority of the time, it's just the way it's done, and no one seems to have a problem with it here. It's extremely easy to unload both cowstails, and unclip them both if you're not paying atttention. I think her error came from having the cowstail clipped into the footloop biner -- those should be independantly attached to the ascender, in my opinion. Dedicated saftey lines would be good -- been meaning to add one to my footloop at least, as you move that around a lot too in this style -- but quicklinks and auto-locking biners don't fit into the technical style over here.
I'm intrigued by these exotic moves. I'd like to learn more.
I don't agree that having a single point of contact on traverses is "just the way it's done". Obviously the victim in this incident had a problem with this style of caving, and even though the primary error may have been clipping the long cowstail to the footloop biner, maintaining a second point of attachment would have prevented that error from becoming fatal.
I also don't agree that the combinaiton of locking biners with Euro-style rigging takes too long. There are biners available that are small, have key-lock gates, and simple auto-locking mechanisms. These add a level of security, and your own argument about the ease of cowstails coming unclipped supports their use.
Perhaps a single point of attachment and the use of non-locking biners is commonly practiced in Europe, but there's a growing pile of dead bodies to support changing these conventions.