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Rope Damage Advice 28-Mar-2010 At 5:10:21 PM sleake

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Well after finally getting my ropes back after Olbert took them on a wild adventure, I took them for a climb today, a bolted multipitch, and something really funny happened. We were using double ropes, one blue, the other yellow, with 3 people climbing, leader tied to both and seconders into one each, something we had all done many times without any issues. On the second pitch the route follow up an arete with a couple of nice rings. The way they are placed caused the rope to run across the corner of the arete and over a couple of ledges, but nothing too sharp or scary. Alan led it no worries, then Jimmy was seconding the start of the pitch, struggled and took a slow, sagging fall onto the yellow strand. As he fell, there was a loudish ripping noise, same sound as tearing fabric, and Jimmy says he felt the rope vibrate weirldy. That freaked us both out majorly, so we wrote the yellow rope off and with a bit of stuffing round managed to bail using the blue rope alone.

Now a bit of history. They are about 6 months old, and the only leader fall they have taken was by Olbert the other day, which was a pretty much factor 2 fall of 3-4 meters, using both strands clipped to the one bolt. Plenty of rapping and few seconding falls... but nothing major.

Just closely examined the yellow rope, pinch test and all, and it is in really good nick still, at no point could I squish the strands together, or really even get it close. Nothing on the sheath either.

So my thinking is this -

Olberts factor 2 was not awesome for the ropes, but did not do any serious damage to them.

The sound was scary, but could have easily be caused by a draw, biner or rope running across one of the several ledges on the pitch.

The fact there is NO physical evidence of damage to the rope

Therefore, while we made a good call by considering it damaged while on route, after having the time to have a closer look at everything it would seem that there isnt much to worry about?

Anyone got any thoughts/experiences/advice? At the moment I see no reason to doubt it.