it's kind of good that
this has happened to you
it's kind of good that this
has happened to me
and that i survived
yeah if that was closer to the ground
it would have been a ground fall
yeah actually if i would have fallen
not from the anchor
but few quickdraws lower
good job you've got a YouTube channel
because yeah
that's sketchy
good job you can share that with people
i think
yeah
so most of the time
i get sketchy situation
that i share on my youtube
from my followers
however this time it was me
I took a whipper from
the top of the route
literally from the anchor
and i instantly realized that this fall
is not normal
I kept falling and falling and falling
and it's just accelerating
and then boom sudden stop
I look down to my belayer
she's maybe few meters up the ground
which looks normal
i look up
at the distance that I fell
and that is completely not normal
first question immediately was
how much slack did you have
did you just gave me 15 arms of slack?
and she was like
no, there was absolutely no slack
in the system
shocked, scared, confused
so i decided to
go up and try it again
but this time
i took half of that fall as a test fall
to see what's gonna happen
and the same thing happened again
i'm just falling falling falling...
boom sudden stop
I look down, my belayer is
only one meter off the ground this time
and she's claiming that she had
absolutely no slack this time
but the fall was equally giant
so by that time my pants were already
quite full
so i asked her to lower me
and i wanted to investigate
what's happening
and i found out what's happening
this was
what was happening
ok go
boy
scary grigri noises
one, two, three...
aaaaah
there you go
here we go
that was a lot
so basically i got a kink and it stopped
and I was not pressing on the cam
so yeah the rope was slipping through the
grigri
and the reason was basically a
combination of three different things
first is that we used very skinny rope
this was 9.0 millimeters rope it's not a
brand new rope however it's still in a
great condition and it doesn't have any
fuzz so it's still very very slippery it
goes through grigri very easily
as a side note petzl says that the optimal
rope diameter for the grigri is between
8.9 and 10 and a half millimeters so
this rope definitely falls in that range
but it slides very smoothly through the
grigri
now the second reason was
was friction the rope went over multiple
angles on the rock and zigzagged between
the quickdraws
so despite me taking a big whipper
which normally would result
into hard "yank" on the belayer or on the
belay device
and would definitely lock it
this time the force to the belaying device
wasn't that hard because it was
absorbed in the friction
and the final, the third reason
or the moment of
oh sh*t
or aha!
was the following
when we hold the grigri in our hand we are
supposed to have a good grip on the rope
however we get so comfortable that this
grip becomes very loose
and in this position
the rope can go through the grigri
very easily because it creates
this nice angle feeding into the grigri
if I would remove the hand from here the
angle becomes way more steep and the
grigri is more grabby
also the grigri grabs more if the rope
going to the climber is more forward
facing, so in this position grigri grabs
more however in this position grigri
doesn't grab as much in fact it almost
doesn't grab at all
so this is what happened
the route was quite overhanging
and had a lip after which
belayer couldn't see me anymore
so she was standing directly
under the first bolt
and as I explained the angle of the
climber's end of the rope is important
in how much the grigri will grab
if you would walk a bit forward
then this angle becomes even negative
and the grigri is even less likely to grab
then combined with with the habit
of holding the brake side of the rope
"holding"
loosely in your hand
which is not holding at all
and combined with the fact that
she couldn't see me
and she had no idea when I'm going to fall
resulted into the rope flying
through her hand
until at some point luckily she tugged
on the rope
and i got a really hard catch
luckily
that was just in time cos
you're falling every millisecond faster
and faster and faster
and i could have been on the ground
so the takeaway is that
you have to subscribe and if you want
extra Karma points you can visit my
website and don't get lazy hold your rope
don't expect grigri auto magically
grab you no matter what
because it might not as I just showed you
from my experience
so I'm happy that this happened to me
I'm happy that I can share this story
with you so it doesn't happen to you
and see you in the next video :)