I've practiced the changeover from climb to rappel before and never had a problem with it. Then the other weekend, at the bottom of Neversink, I was the last one going up and left my pack. 20ft from the bottom...UGGH. This is kind of embarrassing to talk about on a public forum but I promise you I am not a complete idiot, I am just trying to trouble shoot something that I haven't been able to get a verbatim answer for.
I was able to unweight the croll to remove it after attaching the safety, but even with locking off my rappel rack the most I could do was down climb down one ascender at a time - if I removed one, the other was too far up to unweight enough to remove and just be on the rack (my ascender attachment is actually on the really short side so that makes no sense)... I would've had to have just one point of contact (not that I think there's anything wrong with that, but I know that a lot of people stress having 2 points) and put the rappel rack on just below the one ascender - even then I think the ascender would've been too weighted...and I think I tried that. I could have passed a knot no problem - I could unweight one at a time, it was just that last step of un-weighting the remaining ascender to be able to use the rappel rack !!
I settled on downclimbing (and that was one exhausting downclimb and a slow climb back out) and everything was just fine - I'm confident I would've eventually found a way to do it the correct way if I'd had the patience, but with the pack so close (especially that last 5ft on the stretchy rope) I wasn't about to be patient. I just kept putting one ascender directly on top of the other (it involved using the QAS attachment as a footloop and weighting that - doing acrobatics). It was embarrassing and tiring. Luckily no one else saw it; doing that for more than that 20ft would have sucked a lot more. My last resort was going to be to munter down, I thought that might put the munter closer to my body than the ascender and help unweight the ascender (would that have even worked?).
In retrospect I think my safety may have stretched a lot since the last time I practiced this as it is on accessory chord, and I wasn't thinking and could have used my cow's tail to make it shorter... but I was looking online and in OnRope to try and find a detailed step-by-step on how to changeover from climb to rappel (while on a bouncy rope in a free drop and not able to brace against a wall - all the guides I could find were from rappel to climb which is not the problem here - or for passing knots or switching ropes - I can do all that with my setup) and haven't found one. Can anyone go over this step-by-step and describe the difference in lengths between your QAS and ascender attachments? I am going to go over my system and try to recreate the problem, I think all the times I have practiced have been against a wall where I could brace to help un-weight my gear. Given the caves I have recently done I should not be having this problem, I feel like such a caving idiot :(
Thanks :)