I had a bit of a wet weekend in wales but considering all the rain, I managed to stay pretty dry. Of course bad weather meant that we ended up at Tremadog climbing at Bwlch y Moch. I was climbing with Simon Holloway (who is a regular poster here). The original plan was to try and get some winter climbing in, but like I said the weather conspired against us and was wet, no frozen.
We did get a bit of climbing done considering our late arrival to Eric's Cafe. After wandering along the bottom of the crag trying to find something that resembled a dry route. We climbed One Step in the Clouds (VS 4c) with Simon leading both the first and last pitch. I have to say it was an impressive lead as this was his third VS lead to date and first multipitch route. The bottom pitch, which although is a bit rambling, was pretty damp which made some of the moves really hard. Simon coped fine with it. Pitch 2 I realised as I was on it, is pretty easy to loose sight of where you're going. I guess thats why it gets the VS grade because you can't exactly shout down to your belayer to tell you where to go.
When I got to the belay and placed my two wires I relived the feeling of clipping into that belay from back when I'd done Vector and Weever and the intense sense of satifaction I got from doing those routes. I sat there belaying Simon up, gradually rolling down my sleeve, then putting up my hood and eventually zipping everything up in an attempt to stay a little warmer. It was truely a beautifel spot to belay in though.
Dispite the fact we where using my 60metre ropes and I could have linkned both pitches together to make our progress a little quicker but we were in no rush. I knew that Simon would enjoy the final pitch too and I think he did. We topped out happily and abseiled back down from the Grim Wall abseil point.
Dispite our slow approach to climbing that day, we decided to have a crack at another route. The route we picked was a bit of a Tremadog trade route. It was Christmas Curry (severe) of course. It was getting dark while we started off but that didn't bother us as we'd both added our headtorches. What did bother us was the soaking wet layback crack on pitch 2. Simon had lead it and he gave it a bloody good go but it was getting darker and darker until we decided to bin it. I don't think that Simon really wanted to go night climbing and I was getting cold. However we turned it into a postive because it gave me a chance to run through how to back off a route with Simon, which I've found over the years is a pretty useful skill. 
As it was dark we bugged out to the car and sat in the cold cooking up some pasta for tea (with red pesto of course) before heading to Plas y Brenin in the hope that they we're running a free lecture on something climbing related. When we found out it was on river canoing in the borneo jungle we opted to finish our beer and headed for the car to take us to our bed for the night, under the boulders. I'm not going to lie but I was pretty cold. My sleeping bag system of teaming a light downbag with a lighter synthetic bag over the top just wasn't really working. I even added my bivi bag over the top to try and squeeze a few more degrees out of it. I even went as far as adding a hot water bottle!
None of this really helped but then again I was stubbornly refusing to don thermals or my belay jacket as I figured that would be admitting defeat. At least I still have this option left in the future. Now all that is needed is for me to finish building my footprint for my tent so that the ground sheet will stay a little more waterproof!
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