Sometimes you screw things up in SRT. It’s fine, it happens to all of us. You might get your clothes, you head hair, moustache, beard, or other miscellaneous hair (use your imagination…) caught in your descender. You might abseil into a pit full of foul air. You might abseil down to find that the pitch turns into a waterfall. You might leave your pack behind at the bottom of the pitch, and remember it part way up… The list is endless, and get even longer when you start rigging caves. The solution is broadly called ‘self-rescue’, and the first basic technique to learn to deal with entry level SRT problems is a changeover. That is, going from abseiling to prusiking, or prusiking to abseiling, whilst remaining on rope and suspended in mid air.
Firstly, DON’T PANIC! The most important thing to do is stay calm, and be rational, especially if you have encountered one of the more serious scenarios mentioned above (foul air, or hair/clothing (no, seriously, what hair did you think I was talking about?) in descender).
The second thing you’re likely to do is start doing a changeover. Changing from down to up is more likely, so I’ll describe it first.
- Lock your descender off. Seeing as you’re still here, I assume you know how to do that, and it must be a FULL LOCK.
- Unclip your hand ascender and footloop from your harness, and attach to the rope a little bit above head height
- Stand up in your footloop, and attach your chest ascender to the rope as high up as you can get it
- Prusik up the rope THREE times. I can’t stress this enough, each ascender must move cleanly and smoothly up the rope three time each! This is so that you know you’re attached to the rope properly
- Reach down and take your descender off lock, and then remove it from the rope. Continue up to freedom!
Going from up to down is more complex, but thankfully it is also far less frequently used. However, it is important to know how to do changeovers in both directions, and an independent vertical caver should be experienced enough that they can do a changeover with their eyes closed and no directions. Because what happens if your light fails?
- Move your chest as close to your hand ascender as you can get it with the footloop still being easy to stand up in
- Get your descender out, hold it as far to the left as you can get it (assuming it is positioned to the left of your chest ascender), and then kink it around to get where the rope enters the descender as close to where the rope exits your chest ascender as you can. The aim is to minimise the distance between the descender and your hand ascender ascender, but at the same time you can’t get it too close to your chest ascender that you can’t manipulate your descender. Practice is definitely required here!
- Tie your descender off to full lock
- Stand up in your footloop unweighting your chest ascender. Remove the chest ascender from the rope. This is what the finesse in Step 2 was needed for; your descender needs to be able to pivot so you can stand up and unweight your chest ascender, but if it’s too far down the rope, you won’t be able to reach your hand ascender when you sit back down.
- Sit back down. Fingers crossed you can reach your hand ascender. If not, you need to stand back up, put your chest ascender back on the rope, and adjust your descender (it should be possible without removing your hand ascender from the rope, but downprusiking the ascender is ok if you know how to do it). If you remove your hand ascender from the rope and don’t test it with three small prusiks before trying again, you effectively have no protection (a locked-off, but untested rack, an untested hand ascender, and you have too remove your chest ascender from the rope). Yes I know it’s unlikely, but don’t forget the Swiss Cheese Model- disaster can strike when all the holes line up, and you only need them to line up once to die.
- Test your descender to make sure that it’s working. Be VERY economical about the amount of rope you let run through your rack! Otherwise, you mightn’t be able to reach your hand ascender… Lock it back off again once tested.
- Remove your hand ascender from the rope and stow it. Continue off back down the pitch.