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Teaching a new partner
Sep. 20th, 2017 09:32 pmWe moved our usual climbing session from Thursday to Wednesday to meet up with D, the idea being to allow her to hold the tail end of the rope while A practiced her belaying with me as crash test dummy. We ran through the basics and got started with a grigri, allowing me to climb while D acts as safety monitor. After a bit of practice we switched over to an ATC and got confident with that.
Then came the real test: I offered to take a bunch of falls on a easy route to check that A was able to lock everything off correctly. Making sure I was a decent distance of the ground, I made sure there was slack in the system and stood up into the first fall, given the feeling of a bad top-rope fall. Amusingly, I was able to build up enough momentum to yank A off the ground, but she held on to me like hardened pro! All the subsequent falls were on a tighter belay and, without the build-up, I wasn't heavy enough to repeat the feat, but it was probably good practice for me — I'm acutely aware that I need to practice taking lead falls before my next outdoor trip.
We asked if they'd be happy to sign A off as competent there and then, but the Quay, being reassuringly strict about such things, told us they preferred to do it at the start of a session — the idea being to make sure the person had really absored what they were doing and, presumably, to prevent people from being hot-housed by a couple of friends, getting themselves signed off, and then, next session, doing something stupid and unsafe.
As a policy, I have to say it seems like a good one: I've climbed at places where they're disturbingly casual about checking whether you can match your talk with actual knowledge...
Then came the real test: I offered to take a bunch of falls on a easy route to check that A was able to lock everything off correctly. Making sure I was a decent distance of the ground, I made sure there was slack in the system and stood up into the first fall, given the feeling of a bad top-rope fall. Amusingly, I was able to build up enough momentum to yank A off the ground, but she held on to me like hardened pro! All the subsequent falls were on a tighter belay and, without the build-up, I wasn't heavy enough to repeat the feat, but it was probably good practice for me — I'm acutely aware that I need to practice taking lead falls before my next outdoor trip.
We asked if they'd be happy to sign A off as competent there and then, but the Quay, being reassuringly strict about such things, told us they preferred to do it at the start of a session — the idea being to make sure the person had really absored what they were doing and, presumably, to prevent people from being hot-housed by a couple of friends, getting themselves signed off, and then, next session, doing something stupid and unsafe.
As a policy, I have to say it seems like a good one: I've climbed at places where they're disturbingly casual about checking whether you can match your talk with actual knowledge...
