OK, so today was a veteran Pin Oak climb and there was significant crown damage from a previous storm. I climbed DSRT with two Bones. The setup was as follows:
~ 200' Escalator bagged up and loaded into the base anchor.
~ 175' of KMIII and 120' of Tachyon pulled through the same union and connected to the Escalator.
~ 2 BD Bones with bollard sizing to match each climb line diameter.
~ Single rope bridge with Rock Exotica swivel, both Bones loaded into the same swivel eye.
~ 7' positioning lanyard.
~ HAAS 2.0/Clip'N combo.
What I found was that I could rope walk up a single line as normal in SRT, but I could up a bunch of tail weight before leaving the ground, so the second Bone just gobbled slack as I climbed. Nothing different than normal, just a touch slower for the first time with these tools. Footlocking would be a snap if anyone is even up for that anymore. You could easily tend both tails simultaneously with that method.
Having both units in the same swivel eye was really helpful numerous times during the climb.
This tree was WIDE and also fairly wide open for a Pin, but it's super old and pretty beat up. I had a nice central leader to tie into and the Tachyon sort of became the back line while the KMIII was the lead. I must have made that choice since the KMIII is a bit lighter and feels easier to advance around the crown. I had an absolute blast today with this setup.
Planning your route is so much fun, because it's so easy to travel wide distances once you have a couple complementary redi's loaded up. Quite literally, from the outer reaches of some leaders, I could hang glide right back towards the center and prepare to head out into another section. Passing limbs is great when you can alternate one 'scender at a time. You can also keep the lanyard quite short. I probably only used about 4' or 5' of working end the whole time so I could keep the lanyard tail daisied up and snag free. Trust me when I say that with the concept down and a bit of practice, it's easier to manage two main lines as one than messing around trying to stow/unstow a lanyard tail a couple handfuls of times during a climb.
I felt so secure at all times with all the redundancy, but navigating never felt like that. the two tails manage just like one, and even when you have the two lines in different redirects that spread the incoming rope angle above your multiscenders, you can still grab both lines together and tending both tails together on limb walk returns....this is obviously to a point, but needless to say, the farther away you are from your redi's, the easier it is to manage both systems as one. I'm thinking that it's even easier to work both Bones with one hand since the climber's load is shared between the two and maybe that helps. I think it's more than just perceived, even with slightly spread incoming rope angles.
There's a bit of video from my co-worker today, and I'll be sure to post it once it's sent to me.
