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Rave About Your Rack Please do not post retail SPAM.

Topic Date User

Uncoiling a rope (badly) 26-Jul-2021 At 12:30:55 PM IdratherbeclimbingM9

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On 21-Dec-2010 pmonks wrote:
>Chuck it off Echo Pt lookout, during peak season, with hundreds of tourists
>around.
>
>Expert tip: tie one end to the railing prior to launch.
>
>I read a great story about 15 years ago (in Thrutch I think?) of some
>guys (Keith Bell and friends?) who scrounged a bunch of rope from this art installation, and halfway through
>a particularly boozy night decided that the best way to untangle it all
>was to drive up to Echo Pt and chuck it off. In their goony haze they
>forget to tie it to anything, but after watching several hundred metres
>of rope whiz out into the inky blackness, gouging a smoking slot into the
>railing, they realised something was amiss and managed to get it tied off.
>
>Apparently the "TWANG" and jolt of the rope coming taut was rather memorable
>(one of the guys may have had a near death experience, almost following
>the rope over the railing too, but my memory of the exact story is, like
>the story itself, lost in a goony haze).

Yeah, I know, replying to an old thread...
Re TWANG.
This is not an inconsequential thing and should be respected.
I’ve probably posted about this on Chocky before, but can’t find it easily at the moment so will recount again.

From a lot of experience dropping anchored ropes into abysses longer than the ropes involved, particularly when talking 200 m statics into dolines, or down the north wall of Buffalo the exercise can be impressive indeed even if the rope is initially fed slowly into the void, as under their own weight they gain momentum.

Visualise if you will, a snake of rope rising 2 m above a back-flaked pile, and moving at freight train speed ... Loose coils picking up any debris in the vicinity and taking it down with them ...
Once it gets to that stage if you try to stop it it’ll take you over the edge too, along with giving a good dose of rope burn for your impertinence!

Needless to say that your anchor needs to be a good one.
;-)