Vertical caving terminology and methods > Rigging methods and equipment
Pulling An Extremely Long Length Altogether. A derigging technique for removing extremely long amounts of rope out of a pothole, which reduces the amount of rope that needs to be hauled on each pitch. Instead of packing the ropes into tackle bags which then need to be hauled up on the rope for each pitch, or swung underneath each potholer on a donkey's dick, the ropes are tied to each other using a bend that is unlikely to snag (such as a flat overhand bend), to make one extremely long rope. The extremely long rope is flaked onto the pitch base, then pulled up by one of its ends from the pitch head, and flaked onto the floor at the pitch head, potentially then to be repeated for the next pitch. At any time, the weight being lifted is reduced to the weight of the rope for that pitch height, and whatever knots are in it, which is significantly less than the total weight of all of the ropes gathered together. This potentially allows much smaller teams for derigging. However, this is traded for much longer hauling time, which grows as the number of pitches increases (approximately quadratically, as a triangular number sequence). This method works best in caves where the pitches follow on from each other in quick succession, or a great deal of time is wasted packing ropes into tackle bags for intervening passages. This method can only be used with pitches that have minimal obstructions that the ropes can scrape or snag on, since the ropes are subjected to damage from rub points, and can snag loose rocks, sending shrapnel down the pitch onto the rope which sits in the dropzone below. In some cases, it is possible for the effect to be chained so that ropes are being hauled up more than one of the pitches at a time, with potholers positioned at the tops of each of the pitches, pulling the rope up their respective pitch at the same time, but this only works until the rope from the lowest of those pitches needs to be added to the extremely long rope. This method has been used to remove over 1000 metres of rope from a single pothole, and the name appears to have been first mentioned by the Oxford University Caving Club in 1992.
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