Rapping with a tagline - tips?

rgold wrote:...all is now well.

george wilkey wrote:politically incorrect or not, I thought that "biner block on the border" joke was pretty funny.

120 meter skinny lead ropes. Now there is your answer.

Scratch the 2x EDK...all you need is the Mickey Mouse Knot. It's the EDK with an overhand on both tails, tightly cinched to the EDK. Frank Sanders, of the Devils Tower, showed this to me years ago. Also, trust what Greg D. "from Here" is saying...he may be a jerk, but he does know what he is talking about.

Creed Archibald wrote: I also like the idea of not throwing the tag line, but just moving it in and out of a small rope bag or stuff sack. As for the tangling... Man I really don't understand it. We started pulling the tag line. The knot came of the edge towards us. I could see the knot moving. After a few feet, the tagline became impossible to pull and I could see the ropes tangled around each other high up on the rope. The lead line was still near us, which means we probably didn't pull down more than 15 ft of tagline. We ended up securing the tag line to me and the anchor, then my partner climbed and self-belayed up the lead line with a GriGri. When she got to the tangles, she built an anchor, went off rappel, untangles the ropes and then rapped back down the lead line taking the anchor with her. Maybe we threaded the ropes through the anchor in some weird way. I don't know. The whole things was baffling.

Same thing just happened to us yesterday. It absolutely baffled us. Fortunately, it was a brand new tag line and so my main goal was to tag it behind while climbing to get the rope flaked properly. The rappel route was odd enough for serious potential of ropes getting stuck on the pull and the rap stations were 35m apart so we ended up deciding not to rap off the tag line until the last rappel. But when we got to the ground and pulled the tag line, all these twists formed in the rope to an extent that two of us could not get the lead rope to move. I am still perplexed by what happened but I’m now guessing that there must have been hidden twists in the tag line from it being on a coil and being brand new.