Sea Fog

If climbing on the gritstone can be compared to smoking weed, then the cave must be to climbing what crack (or crystal meth) is to drugs (i imagine). Hard, manufactured, crushing, addictive and with a faint stench of burning plastic. But to the user - its brilliant. And yesterday? soggy.

I wanted to go to a wall somewhere but they persuaded me to stay. It did feel tacky in places, and with a lot of work, and the adoption of far out new techniques such as chalk damming we made it just about climbable. If nothing else, it gave us a leisurely warm up. In the style of Jim, almost right out of the car - Bendy shot across halfway house, a quiet fell as he dropped into the undercut, turned and slapped for the shothole - good effort! but sadly he missed, and this was the best go of the day.

Dylan and I make tries, a bit of progress but noone does it. With so many pads we can make a platform from which to try the top. Its not easy! when you see videos of people doing it, they romp up it when they get the shothole, but its not as easy as it looks.

Jim, meanwhile, has set about Left wall high which is soaking. He manages to make it climbable and busts out some good links. I join him at the end and have to say - I recommend the climbing on this little sideways shuffle - its brilliant.

We leave, broken after a good day and doing some hard moves. Jim and I discuss how the reasons you go climbing dictate whether or not you will like the cave. Adam describes people training on boards as weightlifters, and to some extent thats what cave lovers are. For me, climbing is about pushing myself and doing hard, previously thought impossible moves. I want to feel like i have done something at the end of the day, I want to feel like I have had a workout (hence the weightlifting analogy), but for others thats not the way it works. I suppose we all like to push ourselves, but some revel in the physical challenge of overcoming a sequence of moves you arent strong enough to do at first, and some in solving a technical challenge.