bloody maiden climb

So the gang found a new love and we climbed the new 18m/25m wall today at SAFRA Yishun.(the tower in the background) It is the Adventure Sports Centre Open House today as well, so there were more visitors there than usual. Oh we had Alex, Nicholl, Meder and Birgette. KS and Wendy sticked to the 15m.

So I tried the 18m as warm up, (as I'm typing now, my keyboard is wet... my palms are sweaty!) 18m feels different from the usual 15m wall that we are used to climbing. So Alex was shouting "Too frontal le!!" Couldn't help it, 2 week didn't climb. Then I did the chimney climbing... which was new. I only managed to reach the first crack. I think I could have gone on, but really felt heart pain seeing my harness and shoes got scrubbed against the wall. The back of my hands and elbows got quite a bit of scratches and abrasion from the chimney climbing. Ouch. Meder went up quite high on the chimney, and couldn't help keep advertising for his climbing shoes. They are screwed anyway.

Then I took on the 25m. It was simply horrible. Let's say one storey is 3m, then it was like 8 storeys high. The tiles look innocent from the bottom, but I realise they were horrible when my fingers were touching them. Somemore there were lots of loose tiles, irritating. Oh Meder was belaying me and he shouted up, "Hey you look like you are doing ballet!" Finally he realised. That's poetry in motion. Anyway the view up there was nice, could see the service reservoir from the top of the wall.

Something terrible happened. A woman was belaying her husband on the left-most lane, 25m wall, when her husband fell down. It was quite a loud landing and the next thing we saw was the man lying in pain on the ground. At that time a crowd was gathering in front of the wall for a briefing, and that happened right before their eyes. Dunno how the people would think of the safety of these activities. Anyway the man was ok, and his wife got quite a nasty rope burn on her right hand. What happened was, the lady was using an auto-locking belay device (see picture, think it was Trango Cinch, a new product) but she wasn't proficient in using it. After that accident Meder was kind of worried, so I assured him of my belaying and my beloved Air Traffic Controller. I still trust my ATC more than other belay devices. Oh earlier on Meder was still teaching Birgette how to use a Gri Gri (a more well-known auto-locking belay device by Petzl) Come to think of it, scary.

I did my last climb trying the crack climbing. Alex was saying I was doing well, but somehow when I don't have the mood then I won't carry on. So I came down.

Somehow, my palms are super sweaty today. Even while belaying my palms sweated. The worst thing is I ran out of chalk in my chalkbag, so I was desperately sqeezing my chalkball on the 25m climb.

Now stop sweating, palms!