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Cody JW wrote: We tried at bridge day to use a bottom belay on our best guy going down the rope , the guy on the bottom was well north of 200 clipped in the rope with full weight feet off the ground and the guy on rope did not even slow a bit. Maybe these tricks of running at an angle may work , but keep in mind at that time you have somebody screaming down the rope out of control and time is a factor.
DeanWiseman wrote:Yeah, forget trying to weigh down for friction--I don't think that's a good technique for anything but relatively short stuff (say... 100 feet).
johnlhickman wrote:Chad. Speaking of no belay. Did you find out if someone recovered your phone?
John
I do not know why, all I know is it did not stop our guy. I will say most people who have used bottom belays have tried them on a lot shorter drops than this. I am sure it may be possible, but only when the person is close to the bottom belayer . Like I said before, I am not sure most people will want to hang around and wait until the out of control person who has been falling several hundred feet gets closes enough to stop them on a long drop like this. Maybe I am wrong and I could be but I just think your natural self preservation mode will kick in. Our attempt was where the person on rappel was about five hundred (or maybe more) feet up and the belayer pulled straight down with a QAS. I just would not count on one on a drop like that with all things considered. Maybe if a deviation can be used with some sort of weighted pulley where the belayer was not right at the bottom of the rope will give the belayer more confidence. "On Rope" describes this to protect the belayer from a rockfall in a cave shaft. Not sure how that would work in this situation. 900 feet is a lot of nylon. I just remember how much stretch I had to climb out of the rope there and at Golandrinas before the rope felt tight. At Golondrinas I remember climbing out lots of stretch near the bottom, then it felt kind of tight then all of a sudden I would have to climb more stretch out after I went up about 50 feet where the rope felt like the stretch was gone. Before somebody comes up with the suggestion that maybe we were using dynamic, we were using PMI classic pit rope. I am not saying it will not work at all, at some point it likely will. I am just saying do not expect the same result you would get on a bottom belay at your favorite 150 foot pit. Where is Storrick ?? I figured maybe he had some kind of scientific study on rope stretch on long ropes and how that may create problems with a belay . What we did was not scientific , it was just one attempt out of curiosity . I suspect a more thorough test may prove me wrong. I just would not trust one there.Scott McCrea wrote:DeanWiseman wrote:Yeah, forget trying to weigh down for friction--I don't think that's a good technique for anything but relatively short stuff (say... 100 feet).
I don't understand this. I get and have used the J-belay. But, when people say that bottom belays don't work on long ropes, I have never seen a good explanation of why.
Chads93GT wrote:johnlhickman wrote:Chad. Speaking of no belay. Did you find out if someone recovered your phone?
John
I emailed all of the team it landed bya nd the gal who found it responded and is sending it back to me. The micro card is undamaged and the phone still slides apart to expose the qwerty keyboard, lol.
johnlhickman wrote:There might be an article on this in an old issue of The Nylon Highway, which is published by the NSS Vertical Section, or an old TAG-Net posting.
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