Tying into your Harness!!

Just a bit of reminder infomation regarding tying into your Harness when rope climbing (either top roping or leading). When climbing at Parthian recently with another club member, and he was tied in ready to top rope a route, a Wall Supervisor came over and said that the way he was tied in was not to their guidelines. He had a good figure of eight but the stopper knot was not as they preferred. The knot was less than 2″ from the figure of eight but not tight up to it but he had 4 turns of the stopper knot. The supervisor said the knot should be tight up to the figure of eight and should be either 2 (or 3 maximum) turns, as more turns can be less efficient at stopping, and could cause it to come loose. The stopper knot should be hard against the figure of eight to stop the rope slipping in the knot. Also to make sure that when tying the figure of eight, make sure it is pulled tight and has no cross-overs in the knot. I had not realised these issues were such a concern with the stopper knot, so I looked up on the BMC website and found this video, which does back up what we were told. So as we sometimes get a bit complacent, have a look at the video to make sure you are doing the knots as per the guidelines. The supervisor did say that they had witnessed some badly tied knots start to come undone if not done as shown here.

https://www.thebmc.co.uk/modules/video.aspx?id=18&s=2