It’s not like me to arrive late, but today it felt like I did. Despite arriving bang on the hour we had agreed to, both Mario and Craig were already parked up, packed up, and ready to walk in. To be fair Mario had arrived half an hour early so he could scoff some breakfast, seeing he had camped out close by after a twelve lap session at Wilyabrup yesterday. Craig had also arrived early. Having in recent times started getting heavily back into photography, he wanted to take some snaps as first light crept in. Not that it put on much of a display for him today:
We had originally organised to be here yesterday. That was until Craig realised he hadn’t quite absorbed the details and thought we were talking about today. Luckily Mario and I could be flexible and we swapped days, after all this was Craig’s belated birthday climb. By a mere two days. Walking in, it was evident that the zawn would be out of commission. The tide was high, and the swell was sending impressive waves towards the shoreline. All the better for providing a great atmosphere and a specky backdrop for images:
Part way along the beach an area had been cordoned off. A rare and threatened Hooded Plover (Thinornis cucullatus) must have been nesting, not that we could see it. Their tiny and shallow scrape of a nest would be in the open sand just above the high-tide line, with eggs near invisible they can easily and unsuspectingly be destroyed. I also wonder how many more times we may get to see them here. The avian influenza finally made landfall in Australia, with the first Australian case being confirmed in Western Australia approx. two months back:
We didn’t spend time searching for the parents or eggs. If you are keen to see how well they are hidden, there are a couple of images from when we visited Rumpoles Rocks a near decade back in this post https://sandbagged.blog/2016/11/06/rumpoles-rocks/. Which is where I happened to take Mario the last time I climbed with him in my neck of the woods, five years ago. The only other time he has been to Moses was another five years or more before that, to the main area. As such we started on some lines he had not climbed before:
Seeing it was Craig’s birthday climb, I offered to be the belayer as Mario started his onslaught of leads. After all both Craig and I had lead all the lines countless times before. This gave Craig the opportunity to run round the area taking images. And he soon realised that if you snooze you lose. Mario does not hang about and climbs pretty quickly, and on these shorter lines it really didn’t take him too long before he was topping out on most lines. That is not to say he didn’t enjoy the routes and there were none that he outright thought were not worth it:
Although the above line did have him wondering. Not due to the shortness of the route or the quality of the climbing. This wall was a tad wet and it was evident that he really is not keen on wet rock. At least when you climb at Moses regardless of it being wet or not, there is always enough friction to make it sane. In the above image you may think that I was having a bit of a yawn as I was belaying, and maybe I was. But any weariness was soon dismissed when after this line Craig broke out the first thermos to pour a very welcome cuppa:
Even resulting in breaking Mario’s stride for a short while. At least until we pointed him to another couple of shorter lines round this area. I was particularly chuffed when he said that Rolling Thunder was a worthy line, being one of my creations that took many years before I realised it had never been recorded as a route by anyone else. An apt name compared to the other lines on that wall, and for today because of the ocean conditions. The whole time we were here huge clean barrelling waves kept rolling in and crashing down like a clap of thunder:
As such Craig’s camera wasn’t always pointed at Mario or myself as I followed up. At times he would wander off and could be found staring out to sea or along the coastline. We were doubly lucky with the wind never seeming to change to a full land fall. This kept the spray at bay and other than for two climbs the rock remained crisp and dry. That also kept Mario happy, not that he had anything to really complain about. Even when I kindly put the rope ready for his penultimate route, one he didn’t seem overly keen on:
That all changed once he got on this nasty pasty looking line, after which he was happy to place it near the top of the list of the days routes. We didn’t get to see any dolphins, maybe the waves were a little too powerful for them close to shore, or any whales, despite the calmer looking ocean further out to sea, we were however taken by the never ending rainbows in the trail of mist as the waves broke. As you may imagine there were way too many images taken, not by me for a change but Craig:
I had joked as we walked in that Mario didn’t really have a choice, and he needed to bag twelve leads to balance today with his exploits yesterday. And that he did, ending on the second grade 20 of the day. So while many routes here may be in the low to mid-grade range we did keep him a little honest on some of the routes. Not that any of them really fazed him, and even the elephants arse of a top out on this climb fell with relative ease. Fair to say that Moses did it again and all three of us had a stellar day:
Sandbagged 