Anchor point snapped

[DrewB]

Spent an awesome day yesterday strapped to a trauma bed with neck and head in abrace after my anchor point snapped out in an oak i was working on. The trees are known to be a bit dodgy and so we are heavily deadwooding them and inspecting for suspect branches. I chucked a throwline into and over the crown and got rope on adecent anchor. set my line over th main anchor (at least 2x size of my wrist) and also thrrough the rest of the crown to spread the weight over many branches. I tied the tail off to an adjacent tree to minimise the rope angles and proceeded to srt up into the crown. I chose srt for two reasons, its a lot smother on the anchor (compared to footlock or body thrust) so puts less strain on any potential weak points and its really boody hot at the moment and srt wins hands down for me in the heat! As i was going up i started to feel some weird sensation sin the rope and could tell the anchor was starting to giveway, so called my groundie to warn him that something might happen soon. I started to downclimb on the ascnders and then the anchor popped out and i hit the ground. As id gone through a lot of smaller branches, these absorbed some of the speed and also held the main anchor in the tree so it didnt follow me down and hit me.As soon as i hit the deck i moved away as i was expected a big oak branch to land on me-this quick movement is what they think done more damage than the fall. Im pretty sure if it footlocked or body thrusted (or attached a running bowline and single anchored to anchor point)in the tree the results would of been worse-or did tying at the base cause the accident? Anyway, im in ahead brace for 7 days and then back to hospital for more x rays to check its all good. climb safe out there:001_smile:

[Doug Blease]

Wow. Sounds painful mate. Get better soon buddy.

[Joe]

glad your not too bad Drew, it could of been a lot worse!

[Steve Bullman]

jeeez mate....sounds like you were lucky there!

[John Shutler]

dam, glad your pretty much ok bud

[alex_m]

oh crap! hope you get better mate. i'll think a bit more about choosing a high anchor point after reading that. glad it wasn't any worse

[Tom D]

Lucky escape, get well soon.

[Rupe]

Hope you mend soon! What have you actually damaged?

 

Srt might put extra force on the anchor branch, but the back up of the other branches must compensate for that. That anchor was weak either way, so srt was good choice under the circumstances.

[Mark Bolam]

Damn!

 

Close one bro!

 

Hope it's nothing serious. Sounds like it's a good job you used the whole crown and SRT.

 

Mend well, mend soon.

[18 stoner]

Sounds scary that one Drew, could have been much worse.

 

Get well soon.