Deep Water Soloing 2014: Day One
Aug. 30th, 2014 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylSpent most of the day at the Deep Water Soloing competition at down at the canal basin. I arrived in time to catch most of the women's comp and stayed for the mens. It was exciting stuff and some of the problems looked impressively difficult.
For those not familiar with the format, here's how deep water soloing works. Someone constructs a large climbing wall on a floating platform, with the wall designed so that it overhangs the water. In the case of today's competition, the wall was seven metres high and built on barges in the canal basin down by Piazza Terracina.
The wall is set with three groups of problems of increasing levels of difficult, with the competitors starting on the easiest and working their way up to the hardest. The first two problems were set to allow the competitors to top out at the end, while the final problem — someone told me it was graded around a V8 — required them to plunge into the water one they'd completed it. In this case, each of group of problems featured three different sets of coloured holds to differentiate the competition classes: green for under 16s; red for open women's comp; and blue for open men's.
Each competitor gets a three minute window to make a single attempt at the problem. If they make a mistake and fall off, they land in the water ending their attempt. Each attempt is judged and scored by a panel, so points are awarded even if the competitor doesn't send the problem, with the top people in each class going through to tomorrow's final.
I took lots of photos, the best of which are on Google, but here are a few highlights.
I don't think anyone sent the final problem in the open female comp, although two extremely awesome competitors did get manage to get a hand on the final hold.
Only one person sent the last problem in the male open comp, although someone else came very, very close:
It was also good to see a few familiar faces out there, working the problems:
I had a good time and even went so far as to splash out on a blue DWS hoodie — in my defence, it was colder than I'd expected and the shivering wasn't conducive to the taking of photos! I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's open finals and pro competition.
For those not familiar with the format, here's how deep water soloing works. Someone constructs a large climbing wall on a floating platform, with the wall designed so that it overhangs the water. In the case of today's competition, the wall was seven metres high and built on barges in the canal basin down by Piazza Terracina.
The wall is set with three groups of problems of increasing levels of difficult, with the competitors starting on the easiest and working their way up to the hardest. The first two problems were set to allow the competitors to top out at the end, while the final problem — someone told me it was graded around a V8 — required them to plunge into the water one they'd completed it. In this case, each of group of problems featured three different sets of coloured holds to differentiate the competition classes: green for under 16s; red for open women's comp; and blue for open men's.
Each competitor gets a three minute window to make a single attempt at the problem. If they make a mistake and fall off, they land in the water ending their attempt. Each attempt is judged and scored by a panel, so points are awarded even if the competitor doesn't send the problem, with the top people in each class going through to tomorrow's final.
I took lots of photos, the best of which are on Google, but here are a few highlights.
I don't think anyone sent the final problem in the open female comp, although two extremely awesome competitors did get manage to get a hand on the final hold.
Only one person sent the last problem in the male open comp, although someone else came very, very close:
It was also good to see a few familiar faces out there, working the problems:
I had a good time and even went so far as to splash out on a blue DWS hoodie — in my defence, it was colder than I'd expected and the shivering wasn't conducive to the taking of photos! I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's open finals and pro competition.
