So I just bought a new pair of half ropes and used them for the first time at Cathedral the other day. Every belay transition it seemed like when I flaked the ropes across my tie-in prior to bringing up the second, I finished with the orange rope and still had several meters of the blue rope left to flake. This screwed up my efforts at a neat orderly flake, and when my partner then led out, at some point that extra blue rope was reached in the flake and from there on the rope was not coming out simultaneously from the same flake – the orange was always pulling from a flake or two under the blue.
When I got home, I measured both ropes (rather primitively, as I didn’t have a long tape, but trying to be as accurate as possible) and found the orange rope to be 60.3m and the blue rope 63.5m! More than a 10 foot difference! Yeah, it’s nice to get a longer rope than you expect, but when two ropes are meant to be used together it causes problems.
My first thought was OK, I’ll pull and flake 3m of blue first, then flake both together and it should end up even. However, that creates a similar potential problem when I’m pulling the extra rope up as I’m now pulling from different layers down at my second, although at least its not complicating the leader belay.
I’m surprised at how different the two ropes are! While I did get the 60m I paid for with each rope, I guess I expected that ropes sold to be used as a pair would at least be pretty close in length.
Is it worth a call to the manufacturer? Or should I just trim the blue rope to match the orange and avoid the hassle?
