Yorkshire wave

Dave lay back on his pad, staring up at the staminaband undercuts and disbelieving how much harder it felt than the last time he'd tried. The problem, he explained, was that last time was months ago and the intervening months had not been good ones in climbing terms.

We tried, we failed. Rich Ames turns up and shows us how to get to the end but still fail. In fact, I think he shows us this five or six times. Perhaps he will see this and comment to advise whether it went down after I left :



Then came the weekend, and with it crippling mega heat. I opted for a tactical weekend of abstinence. We had people for dinner on saturday night, and as they were leaving he mentioned that there was swell about on the east coast - was I up for it? Hell yeah! All too soon the alarm was going off and the monster and I were blearily bundled into the back of a car laden with surfboards.

I'd never been surfing on the north east coast of England before, and I had been wanting to go with someone else to get shown where to go and so on. As we caught sight of the sea my heart sank - it looked totally flat! My host and driver warned that you couldn't see from there anyway and to wait. We parked and looked from the headland there were waves! Good clean ones too! With a mounting feeling of excitement and perhaps a little trepidation we ran back to the car to get suited up.



I learnt that it looks smaller from the top of the cliffs. When we paddled out it was 5ft on some of the sets and I also learnt that Cayton is a very heavy wave. Which was another new experience for me. The waves seemed to go from unrideable to too steep to closed out in the space of a second and not very much distance. Bit frustrating really. Didn't get to make much of it on my new board as I'm not good enough to catch a wave and be straight into the turn, I need to catch it, get my bearings and then slowly attempt a turn, wheras to get the best out of this you needed to angle take off and get the rail hard in. Basically I couldn't react in time cos I'm still finding my feet. Fun though, and after a two hour session I'd certainly had a workout.

We drove back to Sheffield and went straight down to squiffhanger. Twitter is a marvellous thing. I managed to get up to speed in the car on the way back, so that by the time we got there in time for the finals we already knew nedlog hadn't qualified. Such a shame as it sounds very close.

The finals always lack something when there's noone you know in them, and by the time we left my old man legs were very tired as was I.