cup 'o' joe

 

A surf check is better with coffee in hand.

BGA

 

Al, architect and onetime art director for Wallace and Grommett, reflecting on another quiet fun offshore logging session while the masses battled unfavorable winds elsewhere.

It's starting to be the season for finding the quiet corners out of the wind, for boots, more rubber and rather depressingly gloves and hoods before very much longer. With the dark evenings and winter storms, it's the time of year that my mind starts to focus on climbing (indoors) a little bit. Al is often on the other end of the rope as i dangle two storey's up desperate to clip the bolts before my finger strength gives up. Quite a position of trust if you think about it....... i must remember to stay on his good side!

It's quite refreshing to be able to pick a day and time to go do somthing and not have change plans for weather or tide at the last minute. We're pretty spoilt for choice around here for indoor climbing at the moment. The excellent bouldering room in Pilton school is getting about a third bigger as we speak, Barnstaple has walls in Petroc and an old church, the Mill near south molton is still open and exeter has the quay, reviewed in a previous post.

For those a little further along the coast, Bude just got a brand new bouldering facility, called the chalk house, in the kings industrial park on the edge of town. It's not been open that long and i went to check it out last week. It's a decent size, not as big as say the climbing academy in bristol but bigger than the bouldering areas at exeter or south molton. A lot of the wall is slab rather than overhang though they have plans to add a proper roof area soon they say. It's got a fairly lo-fi feel with ply rather than coated climbing wall surface and is obviously born out of a few peoples passion rather than a big investment by a business. On the day i went, they had just had a comp on so there were fewer routes than normal but there were still 50 routes up. They were ungraded but the majority weren't too hard, many of the steeper ones having fairly juggy holds, which i think is a good thing for a part time climber like me. One big difference compared with other places i've been is the height. The wall tops out at 4.5m which, although is regulation international contest height,  feels a long way up when you're clinging horizontally on bad holds lunging for an uncertain grip!

All in all it's pretty cool and great to have another alternative if you're down that way and the surf forecast lied!

log o clock....

Small wave weapons of choice

race

BGA,five over, racing the section.

The last couple of weekends have had fun clean waves but the onshores are back today. Funnily enough it's the start of the contest season at saunton too. No doubt people in vests are enjoying the paddle workout of 4 foot onshore mushy beachbreak right now. I, meanwhile, have coffee and a smug feeling i'm not missing much!

greyscale...

As the winter sets in and the colours of summer are long gone, it's easy to sink into reverie and dreams of warmer climes, but maybe there's still happiness to be found within the montone seascape.

For many of us there's no escape from the cold and we must greet the winter face on, the gloom, the damp, the light so flat the horizon is lost in the sky. Endlessly watching the forecast hoping for the prevailing southwesterlies to abate for the bittersweet triumph of stolen moments in offshores.  Freezing wind from the east  blowing the mess to corduroy and then to ironed cloth.

You could send yourself mad with the longing but it's better to embrace the dark mornings, the frost on the inside of the windscreen that never clears quick enough, the teeth of the wind biting into exposed flesh as you struggle into the wetsuit that never quite dries, the shock of the first duck dive as you struggle through lines of whitewater, battling current and wind beyond the break.

Because if you look, through the waiting, the discomfort, the grey light, the grimace as your suit fills with 6 degree water for the first time, there's still that little spark of fun and stoke that keeps you coming back. Still the need to grasp that elusive sliding feeling we are all addicted to. Still the afterglow that warms you and has nothing to do with the van heater on full as you drive home, reliving the waves of the day.

It's still surfing and it still makes me smile...............

wave come....