So he missed this week's Suspended Animation lesson. But I attended. LockedSteel agreed to rope bottom for me at the class.
LockedSteel was out of the room when the instructor said that the first half of the class would be about safety, and the second half of the class would be painful for the bottoms.
The lesson focused on how failures happen, and how to get someone down from a suspension if they pass out.
The safety lecture was more technical than I have heard at other bondage lessons. Most of the specifics were provided by a professional theatrical rigger.
Among the parts of the safety lecture and discussion of materials failure was a discussion of problems with rigging through a ladder tie (I like ladder ties much more than I used to).
During a brief practice session I tried suspending from the ladder tie on lockedSteel. I tied a chest harness to the ring. After tying the ladder tie down the leg I threaded it into a partial suspension. Despite using the longest hemp rope that I had for the ladder upline I ran out of rope. I found out later that for this non-load-bearing line I didn't need to use a doubled rope. It was pretty and lockedSteel seemed comfortable. I found it a little easier to thread from the ankle than the hip, but I understand this isn't typical.
Lowering somebody all the way to the ground by only a chest harness is painful. And lockedSteel was a superTrooper through it in the second half of the class. At an arbitrary point in a full suspension lockedSteel was told to pretend to pass out. I then cleared all of the lines except the chest harness line and used the chest harness line to lower him to the floor.
The members of SuspendedAnimation gave constructive criticism. I was told that I needed to make the clearing of the lines other than the chest line a higher priority. That even without any knots that the uplines need to be removed to assure that they don't get tangled. I was told that I needed to have tighter control over the hand-braking of the lowering ropes.
To motivate the need to clear extraneous lines, the instructor mentioned to the class that in an emergency a hip tie (good) can fail into a belly tie (bad).
I learned a lot practicing this safety escape. I'm not looking forward to bottoming for it later.
