I had a Near Fatal Incident - GriGri Slipping

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 :)