Since we're usually visiting caves by ourselves, we finally decided that it wouldn't be a bad idea to learn self-rescue techniques a bit better. So we signed up on a two day course organized by the Polish Alpine Association; this year - on the Birow Mountain.

And it's a good occasion to meet other cavers from around Poland, as well as have some practice in SRT. What's more, exercises that we had to do during our caving course (and with which we had a lot of problems), turned out to be quite easy, actually. You can see that these techniques really work and aren't that hard at all. For instance, even though we had some small problems, Marcia was able to unblock my croll (with a weight ratio of about 17 to 11). And this time, after two days of hanging on ropes, I still could walk (almost) normally... :-)

All in all, during those two days we managed to practice what follows:

• Unblocking and getting down a person hanging in his/her descending gear:
  • on a shunt
  • on a stop-roll
• Unblocking and getting down a person hanging in his/her ascending gear:
  • croll in croll method (cradle method)
  • counter-weight method
• Getting to the victim from a higher level, using the same rope
• Descending to the victim on another rope
• Getting down a belay with the victim
• Getting down a knot with the victim
• Getting through a deviator with the victim
• Getting the victim out of a belay
• A traverse with a victim
• A Tyrolean traverse with a victim
• Hauling the victim up
• and several other tricks that I don't remember anymore (thus, I guess, we'll have to take this course again sometime in the future).

Some of the exercises were being done next to the rock wall as well as while hanging without touching the rock.

So, I really recommend this course to all cavers using SRT. Even if it turns out that you won't use them (and let's hope so), you'll have a lot of good practice in using your equipment.