TradMike wrote:I guess my point is that there is not much time to react . . . .
I like TradMike's perspective in general. I think we underestimate our reaction time, it is longer than we think. Shit happens and bam! you are hanging from the rope before you can think about it or bam! the climber is hauling you off the ground after an unexpected fall and you have done nothing at all to mitigate the situation, no time to plan a soft catch, no time to think twice. The scenarios happen often. If the cam is held open on the Grigri and you have looked away from the climber for a second, perhaps at a potential twist in the rope coming your way, that is a perhaps more than a second of reaction time that you give up on top of the natural reaction time native to all humans. Petzl knows this and hence the nature of the warning in their video, "DON'T RIDE THE CAM DURING OPERATION" complete with skull and crossbones with fragment marks coming from the skull! It is all chill until it happens to you or I as either belayer or climber and then we have to live with it . . . or not.
Maybe I am just more paranoid now because I hear about weekly deckings... I belay with a gri-gri and slide brake hand from rope to gri gri when feeding slack for clipping. During that moment I am acutely aware that a fall during that time could mean death... So I am always watching (if possible to see) and mentally ready to let go of gri gri and make an effort to get back to the rope. I think the only scenario that things could go really wrong would be if some one fell while I was feeding out slack that I couldn't see, and they failed to communicate that they are falling...
climb2core wrote:So I am always watching (if possible to see) and mentally ready to let go of gri gri and make an effort to get back to the rope....
When I used to use the Grigri this is how I did it too. If I had to open the cam to feed fast, I made a mental note to never have the climber leave my sight. Usually I would feed the rope with two hands and not open the cam, trying instead to anticipate the climber's next clip.
climb2core wrote:Maybe I am just more paranoid now because I hear about weekly deckings.
We should all be paranoid. We should all try to learn something from every "HOLY-FUCK-THAT-HAPPENED-FAST" moment. We should all feel small and inept and assay to use the mechanical advantages afforded by these simple machines to be automatically one step ahead of human reaction. We need to use stringent standards to minimize human error.
- We all suck. I suck. We walk into rooms looking for things and we forget, albeit momentarily, why we walked into the room and what the hell we are looking for. If we were mere automatons we would be deemed dysfunctional by our engineers and they would shut us down.
years ago I was also taught to be a bit more active during belaying..ie...always moving around instead of just standing under the first bolt...so when I picked up a gri gri, I transferred it to that device...now a little slack in the system in conjunction with a step or two back or to the side...now if the climber needs rope fast, I can feed rope AND walk in two steps to give them their slack....and if I need to pull it in, I also am ready to merely step backwards.
^^^^ good advice. i spent years thinking about my rope management in terms of arms only. now i always clear the belay area so i can use my feet for micro-adjustments on the feed, reeling in slack, etc.
Belaying needs to be seen in part as a "rope craft," a skill that needs sharpening. Something that for the most part my generation of climbers who come out of gyms and don't bother to ask for help/tips/advice don't grasp. I myself was fortunate enough to have people to look up to who mentored me in safe belay habits, etc.
i love threads like this. i mean, it's like turning on the TV and there's an episode of Seinfeld that you've seen ten times, but you can't help but watch the whole thing anyway.
TradMike wrote:It sounds like it was not the break hand that was the problem it was the hand that held down the cam. Break hand or no break hand would not have fixed this. Take a gri gri, skinny rope and hold the cam open with one hand - I doubt you can stop a fall like this with your other hand, brake hand.
If the brake hand was braking instead of holding the cam open, it wouldn't have been holding the cam open. I've never seen someone using a GriGri hold the cam open with their left while braking with their right.
I guess my point is that there is not much time to react in a situation where the cam is held down and the climber falls. I think we need to go one step closer to the problem and focus on the held down cam and not all this emphasis on brake hand because as you will see it doesn't mean anything in this situation. It takes 1.25 seconds to fall 25ft. It takes the average human auto driver 1.5 seconds to see a need to brake and actually fully depress the brake pedal. If this holds true to some climbers, a brake hand won't mean a thing because the climber decked .25 seconds before the brake hand engaged the rope. Now getting the hand off the cam, which would be a much quicker reaction time, would save the day because a gri gri will more than likely work on its own without a brake. Even better, don't belay with a gri gri if you can't belay without holding the cam down. But if you do hold the cam down please do so with lightning speed on and off. It you ride the cam, so to speak, you will eventually drop someone.
Wow, this sounds like some bizarro logic to me that a hand on the break rope would not help prevent these types of accidents. When it comes to belaying with a type of belay device like the grigri which is not fail safe, I think it is a very dangerous generalization that the break hand is irrelevant. As its already been shown, it is possible to keep your hand on the break end of the rope even when you disengage the cam (i.e. ***temporarily disabling the auto breaking function of the device***).
Also, based on my own experience, if your hand is always on the rope (on the break side of the belay device), it does not take 1.25 seconds or more to consciously/unconsciously process and begin to arrest a fall even when using a Non auto breaking device. If this were the case, then by your logic many climbers would be hitting the deck unless they use an auto breaking device and just "letting go". To me, letting go of something when someone/something is falling feels very unnatural and counter intuitive. Based on my experience, it seems much more likely that our quickest and most intuitive reaction is to clutch at whatever is in front of us or in our hand, and I ensure that to be the break rope (which is always in hand whenever on belay).
"how ironic....now he's blind after a life of enjoying being able to see."~Homer
So what should people do when accidents like this occur?
It seems like some people would agree that mistakes happen. It seems like there's always details that can be handled better. The climber could have mentioned he was dynoing, for instance. The belayer could have made sure he could see the climber - if it was possible to do so. The climber could have communicated to the belayer about the possibility of a fall at such and such spot on the route.
Part of good belaying is simple communicating. It seems pretty cold to shame someone when a mistake happens. Again, I'm not defending anyone here, but I am curious how we as a community should react in these situations--and they can happen pretty often. If there is a climber with a shitty attitude, I get that. If they are genuinely sorry and unsure about what happened, I feel like people should work with them and figure out what happened and correct the mistakes rather than shame them outwardly and dickishly like I saw last weekend. Again, at least some of this shaming was coming from said belayer I know that isn't exactly a Petzl Ambassador for proper belay technique.
Caspian wrote:
Wow, this sounds like some bizarro logic to me that a hand on the break rope would not help prevent these types of accidents. When it comes to belaying with a type of belay device like the grigri which is not fail safe, I think it is a very dangerous generalization that the break hand is irrelevant. As its already been shown, it is possible to keep your hand on the break end of the rope even when you disengage the cam (i.e. ***temporarily disabling the auto breaking function of the device***).
Also, based on my own experience, if your hand is always on the rope (on the break side of the belay device), it does not take 1.25 seconds or more to consciously/unconsciously process and begin to arrest a fall even when using a Non auto breaking device. If this were the case, then by your logic many climbers would be hitting the deck unless they use an auto breaking device and just "letting go". To me, letting go of something when someone/something is falling feels very unnatural and counter intuitive. Based on my experience, it seems much more likely that our quickest and most intuitive reaction is to clutch at whatever is in front of us or in our hand, and I ensure that to be the break rope (which is always in hand whenever on belay).
My point is that the gri gri drops have come from a hand on the cam (or threaded backwards) and nothing else. Telling someone to keep their hand on the brake won't fix the problem. They need to be more aware of the dangers of holding the cam down. In the cases of dropped climbers, for some reason the belayer held the cam open for the entire descent. All they have to do is let go but for some reason it is not happening. We need to look at the reason why they didn't let go of the cam and that is the only way to fix the problem. Do they freeze up thinking I need to grab the brake end and up grabbing the cam harder? Are they not reacting fast enough? Not paying attention while holding the cam? Water-skiers have been known to not let go of the rope when in trouble and all they have to do is let go but yet they don't.
It is all chill until it happens to you or I as either belayer or climber and then we have to live with it . . . or not.
