One weekend in June, two friends, my girlfriend and I decided to go on a trip to Bristol. This was motivated by a few reasons:
- I had recently bought a new car, and I wanted to use it;
- Bristol has a very cool artifical wave park.
The Wave is an artifical lake with a large wave machine, that, together with some clever engineering, leads to the perfect surfing wave every time. I say this as if I know what the perfect surfing wave is. I don’t. I would attach a video of my best surfing, but I can’t figure out how to do that without having to upload to YouTube or Vimeo, so you’ll just have to imagine it.
Anyways, a few days before we were due to leave, the centre suddenly shut. The reason was bankruptcy, but not of them, rather of a ‘funding partner’. It seems the centre is doing fine financially and is due to re-open soon, so that’s good.
Except not good for us, we had planned to climb in the Avon Gorge region in the early afternoon, and surf in the early evening. So instead we climbed and went to the beach.
This route is called Ice Cream for Crow, at least we thought we were on that route. There’s no topo in the Rockfax App (Or Wrongfax, as my friend calls it), and not even a description in UKC. We ended up finding a line a bolts between two climbs that were in Rockfax, which were also the two either side of the climb on UKC, and assumed that was it. We did it in 3 not very well planned pitches. Fun topout though and we even had some ice cream!
We ended up going to Weston-super-Mare, a beach about a 40 minute drive away. I’m glad we ended up going in the evening, the motorway in the opposite direction looked absolutely rammed. It was on the tail end of a heatwave, so I imagine a large proportion of those must have been the daily beach-goers. When we got to the beach though, the tide was incredibly far out. It was difficult to tell the difference between the sea and a mirage in wet sand. My girlfriend and I braved the long journey, but the sand got sludgy, and it seemed the closer we got to the sea, the further it seemed, and the deeper our feet sank into the sludgy sand. After a while, and many complaints from the girlfriend, we turned around and walked back, defeated.
We later found out from a colleague that it has the nickname ‘Weston-super-Mud’, which is definitely fitting…