Garrr! The Pirate, f8c, first ascent.

A couple of months after completing my new route at Kilnsey and it's time to write down some thoughts on what might just be the pinnacle of my climbing career...?

The route is an absolute belter - so much fun to climb with athletic moves between good holds for the majority of it's length. It's also totally atypical of Yorkshire, or even the UK for that matter, being a massive stamina route; 44 m long and 18+ m of that horizontal thugging.

Now for the downside, it's got a single really annoying pocket which seeps far longer than anything else on the route. Due to a finger injury at Easter last year, I missed out on the best period of dry weather in 2017 and this and other seepy holds scuppered my attempts throughout last Summer and Autumn. This year, tactical use of tin-foil on this hold let me work the route and even have some good redpoint goes.

However, if I'm being honest, I wasn't good enough last year and needed to up my game over the winter to get the route done. The only problem with this was that my time resources were more limited, so I had to concentrate on getting the best training value from each session. I ditched long continuity/aero-cap sessions and concentrated on addressing my weaknesses (mainly being weak) and kept my stamina topped up with shorter, high intensity interval sessions instead. This definitely worked and got me up a bunch of new links/problems in Parisella's cave over the late winter/spring. (Caveat - work your weaknesses - this wouldn't get a strong boulderer up a 44 m stamina roof!)

Kilnsey Main Overhang topo

Tactics:

- Tin-foil on the seepy pocket
- Climb faster!
- Reduce rope drag; using a skinny 8.9 mm rope helped lots with drag, as did 4 DMM revolver karabiners, but the crucial thing was skipping draws (I skipped 8 clips in total on redpoint!) and using long extenders to straighten the rope line
- Visualisation - I did this lots before for scary headpoints when I was young and stupid - but I hadn't done visualisation that frequently, or with the high intensity for a sport project before. i think this helped lots for maintaining a good pace on such a long route; even at 44m and ~110moves I could visualise the lot in detail.
- Despite it only being about 6c from getting your hands on the good holds over the lip to the belay, I managed to fall here the session before completing it. I was physically ruined, panting on the floor for 10minutes afterwards, so the next go, I took the opportunity to dog the route and re-work that section, repeat is 5 times and engrain a sequence into my brain. On the successful (next) go I didn't falter and topped out

Video footage here:

The Pirate, f8c - First Ascent from Ally Smith on Vimeo.


Finally a word to the naming logic - one of my cats developed lymphoma in his eyelid/conjunctiva earlier this year, and as a consequence had a traumatic operation to remove the entire eye, leaving him somewhat Pirate in appearance. He's now back on top form, successfully hunting down pigeons and mice with a single eye (and fingers crossed the lymphoma has been nipped in the bud and doesn't come back anytime soon...) There's some photos of Pluto pre- & post-op in the video above.