Anchoring: Focus Floating Guying Concepts

Written By: Lance Piatt

Obviously anchoring as a concept is a huge topic. The variations in any given anchoring course can range wildly depending on the vision, scope, knowledge and imagination a give team or person has. Here is what a typical anchoring course would look like. I have rounded them out to 10 topics.

Anchor Points
Selection and Strength
Back Up Anchors
Single Point Anchors
Multi Point Anchors
Load Sharing or Distributive Anchors
Releasable Anchors
Angles and Vectors
What To Avoid
Efficiency and Effectiveness

Now, within the topic of anchors would be what is called “guying” or here… Guying Concepts. For this exercise I set up a simple gin pole or monopod to be used as a focused floating anchor. There are a few rules we need to abide by when rigging guying systems. Bear in mind, guying systems ARE anchor systems. The main determination between the two would be found in the purpose of use. We have a ton of content within our online courses (Rigging Lab Academy) so I won’t be getting deep into this at all.

The purpose of building a focused floating anchor stems from the lack of an actual anchor where one is needed. So by using the surrounding options, an anchor is formed. These surrounding options could be strong or weak. The weak would simply need to be formed via a multi point anchor system and in so doing, a much stronger supporting structure is created.

A monopod or gin-pole needs to have at least 3 (tri-guy) members and often 4 (quad guy) members are needed. The tri-guy system or “delta” should have 120° between them and a quad guy system should have 90° between.

So again, the purpose here is to build a rigging anchor from which mechanical advantage systems via a two tension two rope system will be deployed. The guying “strands” that I used were simple multi-strand non working mechanical advantage systems. Created for the purpose of keeping the anchor in place during operations. All four guys are used for both tension and compression. Again, this isn’t a “how to” instructional on building these, but instead is more of a visual and let the course instructors due the heavy lifting.

The focused floating anchor we built (as mentioned) is a monopod and thus is considered (potentially) the least stable of all artificial high directionals (AHDs). The main component (here the SMC Vector) is in complete compression and needs to be aggressively guyed at both top (which we have already discussed), but also at the bottom. This bottom section could also be considered “hobbling”, but for me, the different here is that (in my mind) hobbling is considered a splaying counter-measure. Here, I wanted it to be structurally part of the system and while it doesn’t require nearly the engineering the top section does, if the bottom moves… the entire system is minimally impacted.

Gear In Play

Peace on your Days…

Lance

About The Author:

Lance Piatt

Beginning his career in the rescue and rigging world as a “blue collar” SAR member with Deschutes and Jefferson County teams. Lance Piatt owns and operates Red Ibex Solutions, a sales and marketing wheelhouse blending rope rigging education and exquisite imagery with equipment knowledge and understanding; housing Rigging Lab Academy and Rescue Response Gear… Lance is producing high-end video education, working with several experts and instructors to produce unique series of “how to videos” and courses for rope rigging: Such as; the first ever full-length rescue training DVD, 'Tower Rescue', released in fall of 2005. As well as a series of scenario-based rescues ranging from cave rescue to cliff rescue.