My First Abseil

Like I described in the previous post, abseiling (rappelling in the US English) beginners start rehearsing the activity in somewhat easy conditions. A slanting wall, maybe about six metres high. We we ended our Camino del Rey walk, we abseiled down 27 metres, straight down. The techinque was quickly learnt, our good guide Steve from Barbary Rock Adventures took only couple of minutes to teach me and my brother who both were first-time-abseilers how to do it. It wasn't rocket science, and we both met the solid ground without any problems, but we both had unnecessarily tensed many muscles that don't need to be tensed during abseiling. Many muscles we probably even didn't know we had.

Here's a video of our descent. First part is point-of-view footage from my helmet camera, the second one is my brother coming down, shot with a regular pocket camera (hence the shaking). Since we first-timers took our time, I increased the film speed to avoid total boredom, especially since the POV camera shows mostly limestone wall. In the very end Steve the guide abseils down, shown by the helmet camera's normal speed footage.