Those were indeed some noisy neighbors... what were they doing?
I admire how much you learn and do every time you climb... you have perseverance in spades.
But you know how I feel about all that gear... it's in your way. It makes you work twice as hard for every foot gained in height.
If you like to spin when you cycle, the 2:1 thing is probably your best bet but if spinning makes your knees hurt you need to ditch the gear and learn once and for all how to lock a doubled rope. I know it's rough, I know it hurts, I know it seems impossible... but you can learn to do it. Almost nobody just picks it up except little kids. You have to earn it and when you do, it's the sweetest, simplest, easiest, fastest way into the canopy.
Trying to keep it simple is how I came to footlocking... it's as simple as it gets. I don't mean competition footlocking but rather using ascenders and a short tether so you can rest between every lock if you want without losing height.
I started climbing with a setup based on single rope ascent with ascenders and etriers (rock climbing style). From that I adapted it to DdRT and the 2:1 thing, then I added a Pantin... after like 10 different systems like frogging and RADS I was still killing myself with that wretched 2:1 ratio... it's just SO much work for the gain in height. Actually frogging on SRT wasn't so bad.
Fortunately Brian Kotwicka showed up to work with Guy and me and he taught me to footlock. I was miserable at the doubled rope thing and ended up going 70' footlocking the tail my first real time. It was again, brutally exhausting and must've taken 20 minutes, I could barely work after that, but I persevered.
Now all that gear stays in the bag or the garage except the ascenders and going as high 70' on a doubled line is so much easier than than doing the 2:1 one thing.
We're gonna work on this at the 9th Annual Fall Climb right after we visit Easy and Family at the hospital and rescue a couple of cats for the barbecue.
Nice new rope by the way.
