Aberdeen city break

I can’t believe 2 months had passed without climbing outdoors on rock in Scotland. I can’t remember the weather being so unhelpful during the winter for several years. Lochaber has just been hammered with rain and gales and it seems my options for getting on projects have been basically nil. 

No matter, all the training on plastic has been worth it. But severe withdrawal symptoms from climbing a real piece of rock set in and so I took a gamble and drove over to the Aberdeen sea cliffs in the hope of finding something to climb.

It worked! I dropped Claire and Frieda in Aberdeen and somewhat bleary eyed from the early start and long drive, stumbled into Cammachmore Bay for a look at Devistator 8A. After a couple of tries this went down so I nipped over the hill and just beat the rising tide into Clashfarqhuar Bay and did Delirium 8A. Next day I missed my tide window for Clashfarqhuar  and after a fair bit of faffing about trying to remember where Craigmaroinn was I found it and went for a look at Twilight Princess 8A. It’s a link between the start of Kayla into the finish of Pit Left Hand. But as I was improvising my climbing plans and didn’t have the description to hand I assumed it must traverse all the way into the furthest left straight up problem since that looked like the obvious hardest link to be done. I even went strict and dropped down into the starting holds of this to make sure. But on returning home I found that I’d finished up the wrong problem (The Buzz 7b). Not much difference, maybe a touch harder but yet another variation in the wee cave.

It was a nice reminder the nothing ventured nothing gained rule and that even Scotland in January occasionally throws a psyched climber a lifeline. Little video of these above, in the solitary climber style of camera propped on a rock...