Horizontal Rigging 3: Major Taglines / 2 Rope Offsets

This is the third and final course available in the Horizontal Rigging series instructed by Pat Rhodes, someone who has long been considered a mentor to thousands of riggers throughout the world. The various courses inside the Horizontal Rigging series unpack the National Fire Protection Association's (NFPA) Awareness, Operations, and Technician platforms for elevated horizontal systems.

Major taglines employ two mainlines and two belay lines at the same time; the two working in harmony while one is in the lower mode and the other is in the raising mode. Major taglines are most often use to negotiate larger type gaps. In most cases, the major tagline has two notable advantages over highlines. Anchoring is not as critical because vector forces created by the tagline system should never approach those of highlines, and the major tagline is much quicker to implement than highlines.

A directional anchor is typically a pulley that allows us to redirect a rope; this can be elevated as in a high directional, or low as a simple redirect, or anywhere in between. When we want a directional pulley to be adjustable, we simply add some mechanical advantage influence that allow us to make the directional pulley dynamic (movable). This is a common need for gaps that are too large to get a tripod over or some other form of high directional. Simply put, a dynamic directional allows us to rig a directional pulley out and over a gap where other options are limited.