An interesting question to consider is has ANYBODY ever been saved by knots in their abseil rope? Personally, I've reached my knots before. But I was watching them. It was a '40m' abseil with a doubled 60m rope. With stretch I was 3m off the ground. I just untied the knots and let the rope slip through and then down climbed the last 3m.

Yeah. Friends of mine decided that on their wedding day they'd climb up a multi pitch route and get married on the top of said route. The conditions that day were crap. Super frigid and so much fog that you couldn't see more than a few feet in front of you.
Anyway, I rapped a subsequent line so that I could take pics of them climbing. On the second rap I see these indistinct shapes fluttering into my view from beyond the fog. "What the hell is that?" I'm wondering to myself. Well I'll tell ya it was pterodactyls man. A whole flock of them.

[image]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5NRRnAsk4ZY/SyfGWhNTZvI/AAAAAAAAAKk/vxNyDzZm_eE/s320/12.png[/image]

So here I am hanging on a rope several hundred feet off the ground, blanketed in an impenetrable fog, and somehow a freakin flock of prehistoric flying reptiles found my a$$. So what did they do? I'll tell you what they did. They tore me a new one thats what. They swooped in and bit and pecked and gouged at my face and eyes. Needless to say I tried to fight them off. And like the retard that I am I lost control of the rap in my efforts to avoid being mauled to death by pterodactyls. (I didn't have a prussic back up. Idiotic, I know)

[image]http://images.flabber.net/files/lees_verder/assholeoatmeal.jpg[/image]


So did I plummeted quickly to my death? Nope. I was on the high friction side of my device and I descended at a snails pace. So much so that I didn't even realize what was happening until I jammed up against the knot I had tied at the end of the rope. Did I thank my lucky stars that I remembered to tie the knot? In hindsight you betcha. But not then when I was dangling at the end of the rope like a stuffed pinata getting murderplexed by a mob of angry avian predators.

So after the pterodactyls finished kicking the crap outta me they flew off. I came to a little while later, extricated myself, and ascended back up the rope to the anchors I had rapped past. Got myself into position in time for the bride and groom to climb past.

So in answer to your question I have had my a$$ saved by a knot at the end of the rope.

Supra

Turns out the pterodactyls were actually falcons. But I'm sticking to Pterodactyls. Those suckers were HUGE!