Ropewalker advice
Posted: Sep 1, 2013 1:41 pm
Hi,
I am a UK based mine explorer mainly active in the Tamar Valley (where Devon joins Cornwall - the sticky out bit in the south west).
For the past few months I have been tinkering with rope walking. In a land where frogging is universal I am considered by my mates as something of a dangerous heretic.
The problem I have is that there is little or no first hand experience of ropewalking on this side of the pond and I am ploughing a lonely furrow. What there is dates from the 1970s when British caving was a tad more open to experimentation.
To date I have built myself a twin roller chest box (on the lines of the Bluewater box) and harness which I am pretty happy with.
What I am not so happy with is setting up my jammers:
My mark one rig consisted of a floating knee jammer (Petzl Basic) on my right foot with a bungee over my shoulder to the back of my sit harness and a Pantin on the left. This worked moderately well although I despair at the Pantin which drops the rope at every opportunity. In desperation I locked the Pantin with a crab but this doesn't strike me as an elegant solution.
The mark two rig was a full blown double bungee ropewalker: Basic on left foot, basic floating at knee height on right. They were connected by a bungee running though a pulley on the chest box. I ran the QAS line through the second roller. This worked fine in practice (twenty foot oak tree) however when I used the system in anger in a sixty foot mine shaft after thirty feet of satisfactory progress I found that the bungee chord was binding and I was forced to manually pull my jammers up.
Do I persevere with the double bungee rig or do I start thinking about the mark three?
I am a UK based mine explorer mainly active in the Tamar Valley (where Devon joins Cornwall - the sticky out bit in the south west).
For the past few months I have been tinkering with rope walking. In a land where frogging is universal I am considered by my mates as something of a dangerous heretic.
The problem I have is that there is little or no first hand experience of ropewalking on this side of the pond and I am ploughing a lonely furrow. What there is dates from the 1970s when British caving was a tad more open to experimentation.
To date I have built myself a twin roller chest box (on the lines of the Bluewater box) and harness which I am pretty happy with.
What I am not so happy with is setting up my jammers:
My mark one rig consisted of a floating knee jammer (Petzl Basic) on my right foot with a bungee over my shoulder to the back of my sit harness and a Pantin on the left. This worked moderately well although I despair at the Pantin which drops the rope at every opportunity. In desperation I locked the Pantin with a crab but this doesn't strike me as an elegant solution.
The mark two rig was a full blown double bungee ropewalker: Basic on left foot, basic floating at knee height on right. They were connected by a bungee running though a pulley on the chest box. I ran the QAS line through the second roller. This worked fine in practice (twenty foot oak tree) however when I used the system in anger in a sixty foot mine shaft after thirty feet of satisfactory progress I found that the bungee chord was binding and I was forced to manually pull my jammers up.
Do I persevere with the double bungee rig or do I start thinking about the mark three?