Don't think because you learned something once, you know it forever.  

I had a humbling experience yesterday.  

We went climbing at a gym for a friend's birthday.  This was cool to get out of our local area and see our friends climb and have a good time.

I've never been to this particular gym, and my wife went once before.

Anyway, I made the decision to go up to the desk as we were putting on our harnesses and ask if we could get checked off for top rope.  Partly because its the right thing to do, but also because you get these sweet tags for your harness (I'm a sucker for stickers and things like that...)

The front desk person was very nice and said he'd check us out.  We went over to a climb and he had us tie in, belay eachother, catch a suprise fall, and demonstrate that we knew what we were doing.

I climbed first.  It was a cool 5.8 with a little bit of a backwards lean towards the top.  The wall was much taller than I'm used to in our local area.

My wife crushed it on belay and next it was my turn.

I didn't expect any problems but while belaying, I must have developed a rhithim rhythm that could use some refining...

Although, I was keeping both hands on the rope and never letting go of the brake strand, I was grabbing the brake strand above my ATC, then pulling it down.

The instructor nicely said, they like to see the PBUS method (an example is shown here), or waterfall method, which is pretty much standard across climbing gyms, nowadays.

While pulling in slack (on the brake side), you lock off (down), then cross your loaded side hand (guide hand) down under your brake hand, grab the rope, and slide your brake hand up.

This made total sense and is a great way to make sure the climber is locked off as close to 100% of the time as possible.

Took the advice and had a great rest of the day.

Safety first!  (Don't become the safety brief.)