A leafy gent

According to the mighty met office - the soothsayer of hopes and dreams, yesterday should have been the best day of the week. We should have basked in sunshine but instead, as usual, we awoke to drizzle. Packed the monster off to work and started the hunt to see which of my friends were keen. Ed had arranged to go tradding (but ended up at the Tor), Dylan had to work, Jim went with Keith and Adam to the Churnet, Paul Bennetts dad has the familys enthusiasm and is off to Stanage (but ends up turning back) and Katherine Schirrmacher has given rubicon up as a bad job, but Jules Littlefair's keen.

The morning of work passes quickly and soon I'm Rubicon bound plotting whether its possible to buy wellies on the way. It has to be flooded surely? Jules and Stu went the previous day and it was soaked with condensation... and flooded. Thankfully it is possible to buy wellies at Calver crossroads, and through a quirk of fate, the wellies I end up with (£11.99) are the same colour as my little Arcteryx jacket - khaki green. I have a yellow moon t-shirt on and brown patagonia pants. The combined affect of which is that I look like a forest ranger. I am delighted with my new purchase and cannot wait to test them in the swamp beneath the crag. I am not disappointed. Its fully flooded :
But with our wellies we are undeterred and soon dropping stuff off on the island beneath the sissy. I'd come to get on Beluga, but its more than 6" deep beneath caviar and the two pallets we could make a platform out of will not keep a pad dry. Zeke looks drier than it has done, but if Jules is going on the Sissy, and has a sequence, I will probably get more out of going on that. I haven't been on it in about 5 or 6 years, and then I didn't get anywhere, so that sounds like fun.

Checking out the rest of the crag, I am suprised to see that there is water beneath Kudos. I dont remember it ever being this bad before :
Which is bad, but I have some confidence that can still disappear - more worrying is this patch of seepage starting above the press :
But again, if the weather improves, that could dry out without getting too much worse.

Jules puts the clips in the Sissy and shows me the way. I spend an age working out foot sequences and the like and it feels dirty hard. She has a redpoint and looks pretty composed, apparently doing the match move and then slipping off moving right. It comes to my turn and with my new sequence committed to memory I actually look to be in with a chance. The match stops me - it feels so hard, but thankfully Jules notices I am attempting to pull on the rubbish bit of the hold rather than sharing the finger jug. I change my sequence and try again - the match feels ok! I push on to the top but am a bit scared on the final jump. I try this a bit more and whilst the move is ok I'm wimping out - I dont know what it is I expect to happen to me - i'm right next to the bolt! I come down, Jules has another redpoint, making progress - the match is better but she's off again. I'm now also into redpointing territory, but I'm trying with the 4th clipped. You'd always do the route with the third clipped, because you can climb down from there, I wouldnt take the tick with the 4th clipped, because the fourth clip is quite hard and probably adds something. My thinking was that I wanted to have a go at the climbing today and see whether I could do it at all. Anyway, I pull on again. The sequence is further refined and I take all the holds just so. I pass the match with beans to spare and rumble rightwards to set up for the jump. I can feel my arms are a bit pumped, I set up for the pop, pull up, then sag back, pull up sag back - 'Take!'. Gaylord. So basically, i just diddled myself out of climbing it continuously because I was worried about what turns out to be a nice clean fall. I'm quite cross with myself. I do the move, clip the 5th and then strip it back to the 3rd for jules RP.

She gets back to the match but falls, this time with two split tips. We're both getting anihilated and on my next go I feel knackered too. Ah well, its all progress. A familiar face called Sam turns up and has a quick go before we scoot off home - he's into redpointing territory too. On the way home we discuss that you can either train to get so strong that you will never fall off, or you can learn to fall off and get more done. Classic Littlefair wisdom, and I recognise thats why I didn't go for it. I didn't want to run it out when I wasn't 100% I could hold the holds. This is what always stopped me on the Freemonster. The moves felt piss but I would get pumped and stop before I had to try.

Its funny how you can look at a climb and feel complete antipathy, then actually attempt it and not be able to wait to get back there.