Ghosting: The Omnisling - Part 2

Testing and Using the Omnisling

We kinda wanna make sure it's going to work before we commit our life to it. "Work" in this context means two things: A. that it will hold; and B. that when we decide to clean it, it will come free. There are several different ways to do this, here is one protocol which I find efficient.

1. Test Pull with the first person down. A person rappelling on the rig will tighten up the toggles, and make it more difficult to clean. As a rule of thumb, we strive to have exactly one person rap on the actual rig before we clean it. We are going to perform a "test pull", and to make it a good test, someone needs to rap on it first. I try to choose someone who is just a bit heavier than me, assuming I am the last one down. For the first person, we back up the rappel rope to another anchor which is slack, so the full weight of the person is applied to the rig. (Perhaps the backup anchor should be 'just slack', so that if the rig should fail, the rappeller will not plummet very far). Then, the first person down 'tests the pull' by trying to clean it, pulling on the cleaning side. Pull baby Pull! The slack in the backup anchor allows them to pull the rig all the way apart (before the backup catches). (You may need to add slack to the system). If you also want to see if the clean side of the Omnisling will come out around the object cleanly, be sure to add enough slack for this to happen.
We then re-rig the Omnisling as before. This is an excellent opportunity for someone to learn how to rig the omnisling under careful scrutiny. NOW, we rig our secondary anchor so that it bears the weight of rappellers #s two through 2nd-from-last. They rappel. This shows one way to do it, using a second anchor.
Alternatively, we can use a single, large carabiner to complete a static anchor, and clip up the rappelling rope to it, similar to a 'courtesy anchor' rig.
Soon enough, everyone else has rappelled, and we are left alone at the top of the drop. We remove the backup anchor, take a careful final examination of our rigging and, if we like it, gently rappel ourselves.
Time to clean the thing. To minimize the loss of force over an edge, it is usually best to move back away from the drop to get a straighter line of pull to the anchor. Two stout pulls remove the rope-bight toggles from the system. The rap-side and clean-side of the rope are now equal, and both can be used for the final cleaning.
A final stout tugs pulls the self-toggles out of the slots, and hopefully the clean end of the Omnisling snakes cleanly out from behind the stout object, and the whole kit and kaboodle falls at your feet.