Nearly grit season...

I have that fantastic ache you get after spending a day climbing: shoulders, fingers, forearms, the lot basically - they are all throbbing away gently to themselves after spending the day bouldering at Caley and generally having fun.

Got the Caley classic, Smear Arête sent second go - a really nice problem with a brutal pull on followed by a heart stopping move to get stood up and then it is pad, pad, pad (again with a lot of trepidation) to the top. A great problem and one that shows just how good bouldering on the grit can be. Did Chicken Heads but don't think I can claim the tick as I came in from the right and it just doesn't feel hard enough for the grade that way - my feeling is that it has to be done direct to get the full tick but for it to feel possible to mere mortals such as myself it needs to be a couple of degrees cooler. Also started working Forked Lightening Crack and had similar problems - the crimp for the right hand will feel much better when it is a bit cooler and though it didn't feel that bad yesterday it just didn't feel quite right. It is a hard move to get the left hand up and you need to trust the crimp fully, something I couldn't do as I was constantly aware of a slight layer of moisture between my hand and the hold regardless of how much brushing I did or chalk I used. For now it will just have to be added to the ever growing list of 6b nemeses that I have got on the go but it is a really nice problem - powerful and with a degree of technical nous required as well. Other than that we just ticked off a fair few easy problems before retiring for a couple of well deserved beers - a grand day out in all.

The curse of pROJECT mAYHEM.

In my ramblings of a few days ago I mentioned that pROJECT mAYHEM was losing power steering fluid and that it was, hopefully, going to prove to be a cheap fix. Yeah right - this is pROJECT mAYHEM we are speaking about here so the chances of a cheap fix are somewhere about the same as me climbing 8a... Turns out that the problem is the steering rack itself leaking - £300 to get reconditioned plus labour on top of that. Just as bad is a whole week with the van stuck in the garage because the market for reconditioned steering racks is not that big so they get done on an ad hoc basis. I could have had it back today if I had been prepared to bolt on a new one but the extra £200+ that would have cost soon put that idea to bed. Bugger!!

Anyway after receiving this great news it was a simple choice between climbing wall and pub - I eventually decided that I could do both and hit the Climbingworks with Duncan Disorderly and Tim. For the first time back on plastic in ages it went OK - got a fair few problems done, fell off some other stuff and generally had a good time socialising - all the best things about climbing on the plastic really. One thing I am going to have to suggest though is that the Climbingworks offer free entry for the best sob story of the day - I reckon I would have been a 100% cert yesterday if this genuinely brilliant idea had been implemented before now.

Following the wall it was off to the Sheaf for part deux of the evenings grand plan. It was the usual Thursday night scene with climbers everywhere so more talk about climbing and the like followed and the night was completed when I was asked by Dave Thomas to go and do some trad sometime soon...

Weekend ahoy!

Well at least for me since I finished work at 7AM this morning and don't have to be back at work till 7AM on Sunday (hopefully later).

Tomorrows plans are to run pROJECT mAYHEM into the local garage as it has started to lose power steering fluid from somewhere which is not really what I want in life. Hopefully this is just a result of the missing bracket that was highlighted on VW's check over and the pipe that it is supposed to hold has been rubbing and worn through. Otherwise it is probably the seals on the power steering pump itself that has gone tits-up which is not so good but still not exceptionally bad when compared to the cost of the ECU replacement. Either way I will be pushing to get it back tomorrow night (Thurs) if at all possible.

Assuming that I do get the van back tomorrow, Friday will be spent at Curbar trying the usual projects and maybe starting off this years campaign on Gorilla Warfare.

Friday night will be spent drinking wine in Leeds and then off to explore some North Yorkshire grit on the Saturday. Where depends on how far the "dear boy" is prepared to drive but he didn't seem too put off by the prospect of a trip up to Slipstones when it was mentioned in the pub earlier. A "casual" mention of the fact that the Black Sheep brewery is in the vicinity has hopefully swung this as the choice of venue so maybe the outstanding project that is Right Hand Twin will get resolved.

Saturday night - make it up as we go along!

Good day\Bad day or some random combination thereof

To be honest the last couple of days have been pretty bloody good actually after returning from the home county of Suffolk which always tends to weird me out for some reason or another. Yesterday was spent getting back on with pROJECT mAYHEM stuff and today was spent trying to slay a couple of nemeses at Curbar with Sloper. Do I need to say that the two nemeses I am referring to are Strawberries and The Ultimate Gritstone Experience? Probably not...

Strawberries didn't go particularly well - felt all out of sorts on it and the best I did was to get half way through the rock over move at which point I started to believe that it was possible, scraped my right hand up the face and lost it. Spent a while after trying but it turned into too much of a process of breaking it down into individual moves and trying to link them. The end result was that nothing was flowing so I sacked it off - even so I feel I have broken some sort of barrier with it though quite what it is I am not 100% sure at the minute.

Anyway after feeling a bit out of sorts on Strawberries it was a bit of a trudge off up the hill to TUGE (standing start). After a couple of finger scraping attempts with a duff sequence Sloper pointed me in the right direction and the bottom section just clicked. Reached my previous highpoint in way more control than I had before and after that it was (almost) smooth as silk to there every time. I got to that point at least four\five times and at one stage I had my left mitt over the top of the overhang on a really good hold but a combination of sheer excitement\anxiety, a foot blowing and not having a clue what to do robbed me of a possible send. Regardless of that I made tangible progress today and I have a couple of good ideas on how to proceed past my new highpoint so it's looking really good.

So to sum things up: gritstone season is not quite here yet but one big YYFY moment is in the pipeline fo' sho!!