One of my local climbing partners Chris Jones was back from his offshore work this week and today we met up at the Sport climbing venue Anstey’s Cove.
Anstey’s is one of Chris’s favorite climbing venues in Devon so it was no surprise that he wanted to head there, even though he hadn’t climbed in three weeks and the sport climbing at Ansteys is pretty steep and unforgiving if your fitness is lacking.
The best climbing at Anstey’s is on the two steep walls that have the bolted sport climbs. There’s plenty of routes but their all pretty hard and not much in the lower grades. There are a few trad lines dotted about as well but there are better lower grade routes in the nearby quarris at meadfoot, telegraph hole and daddyhole.
It was a fantastic autumn day today and it was a pleasure to be climbing in the sunshine where the walls were sheltering us from the wind.
I felt a little out of practice, and still a little sore from all the winter training so we played about on an extension start to one of the all time classic bolted routes in Devon, “Empire of the Sun”. This new start adds about 35ft of pumpy climbing onto a already fairly pumpy route, which was beyond me today, but I did get some good lead falls in and it’s good to try hard – all good training I reckon.
Chris had a good few burns on the top rope – he’s got himself another project…..
