Deep Water Solo 2016: Female Semi-Finals
Aug. 28th, 2016 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylSecond day of Exeter's third Deep Water Solo competition at the Quay, with some very hard problems quickly separating out six finalists in each category.
This gives a pretty decent impression of the wall and of the three different semi-final problems, with the difficulties increasing from left to right. The green routes were climbed by the U16 girls, the red by the U16 boys and by the women, with the men climbing on blue. The problems were graded very hard, extremely hard, and outright impossible by the setters, with even the strongest of competitors struggling and a very limited number of tops; indeed nobody manage to send the final route, although two of the men managed to touch the last hold.
With the morning taken up with the under sixteens, the open competition started with the women at around 12:30 and it quickly became apparent just how hard the problems were.
The second problem featured an early dyno which threw a few of the competitors, a powerful move to a taijitu volume, with slopers on the head wall:
The final move off the spiderweb hold called for careful balance and a big commit. Rhos did the move extremely dynamically:
The weather by this point was rather wet, as can be seen from the water running off the front of the awning which, thankfully, extended several feet out in front of the wall keeping the climbers dry. Kudos to whoever decided to rig the tarpaulins up in advance — last year the women's semis had to be put on hold for an hour or two while a roof was rigged up to keep the rain off; I suspect the extremely cold and unpleasant conditions experienced by some of last years semi-finalists might explain why more than few of them chose not to enter this year.
Having arrived in bright sun, I'd managed to slip into a shadey spot which also turned out to be out of the rain, when it arrived in earnest.
Fortunately the showers soon passed and the competition was not badly impacted thanks the careful deployment of an umbrella. Emma Twyford, one of the first to make it on the top section of the route, reported some problems with wet holds and the route setters sprung into action, drying them with chalk and scrubbling off the residue.
And with the women's finals decided, we moved straight into the men's semi-finals...
This gives a pretty decent impression of the wall and of the three different semi-final problems, with the difficulties increasing from left to right. The green routes were climbed by the U16 girls, the red by the U16 boys and by the women, with the men climbing on blue. The problems were graded very hard, extremely hard, and outright impossible by the setters, with even the strongest of competitors struggling and a very limited number of tops; indeed nobody manage to send the final route, although two of the men managed to touch the last hold.
With the morning taken up with the under sixteens, the open competition started with the women at around 12:30 and it quickly became apparent just how hard the problems were.
The second problem featured an early dyno which threw a few of the competitors, a powerful move to a taijitu volume, with slopers on the head wall:
The final move off the spiderweb hold called for careful balance and a big commit. Rhos did the move extremely dynamically:
The weather by this point was rather wet, as can be seen from the water running off the front of the awning which, thankfully, extended several feet out in front of the wall keeping the climbers dry. Kudos to whoever decided to rig the tarpaulins up in advance — last year the women's semis had to be put on hold for an hour or two while a roof was rigged up to keep the rain off; I suspect the extremely cold and unpleasant conditions experienced by some of last years semi-finalists might explain why more than few of them chose not to enter this year.
Having arrived in bright sun, I'd managed to slip into a shadey spot which also turned out to be out of the rain, when it arrived in earnest.
Fortunately the showers soon passed and the competition was not badly impacted thanks the careful deployment of an umbrella. Emma Twyford, one of the first to make it on the top section of the route, reported some problems with wet holds and the route setters sprung into action, drying them with chalk and scrubbling off the residue.
And with the women's finals decided, we moved straight into the men's semi-finals...
