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| new arrival #2 |
Today's excitement was the arrival of our new rope.
Actually, this was the second most exciting new arrival today. There's another, very cool one that I'm annoyingly going to not mention again until another day...you'll just have to keep reading! ;-)
We bought this rope from my 50th Adventuring Fund (see Day 32 blog entry).
It's a dynamic, single rope, 70m long by 9.8mm in diameter. Somewhat surprisingly, it feels noticeably thinner than our 50m by 10mm rope.
In any case, it's a lovely rope, and will be accompanying us on many climbing adventures in Spain. We're taking it out there in a couple of weeks time, and leaving it there for future trips.
Our other ropes are 40 or 50m in length, so this one seems very long! The sport climbs in Spain are generally longer than they are here in the UK, and you often need to abseil off after a climb. Longer rope means longer abseils, which is at worst convenient, and at best absolutely necessary, depending on the specific location.
When you buy a new rope,it comes coiled as in the top photo. It's essentially one long spiral of rope, and unless you uncoil it properly, the rope will be twisted, which can cause it to knot, or have other annoying or dangerous effects.
Part of this process is to run the rope through a carabiner, end to end, a number of times. This pushes kinks and twists towards the end of of the rope where they can helpfully drop out (dude...).
Here's the rope part way through this process.
Having done this about a dozen times, I then folded the rope into our usual large storage knot, creating this lovely giant yellowy-green squid.
So there it is, all ready to take us up our main goal in Spain, which is to climb a route called Derecha del Espolon, at Pared Negra in Orihuela, Costa Blanca. It's the yellow route on this image.
242m, 4 pitches...we'll definitely need that 70m rope!
By far the longest route we've done (previous record: 80m, Hail Bebe at Tremadog).
Bring it on!
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