Over the years, the British have given us many things: the Whillans sit harness (very similar to my first harness, yellow, heavy, with floppy gear loops that were impossible to use), gritstone climbing, the Wide Boyz, skeg boats and rudderless kayaks, and my two favourites: “conditions” to describe rough water encountered while sea kayaking, and “let’s crack on” a general exhortation to get moving or speed up the pace.
Sunday promised “conditions” but disappointed. The BOM forecast was verging on desperate with a strong wind warning, and a 2.5 metre swell, although inshore, MetEye was only predicting light winds. The wave buoy, located - when last spotted - about three kilometres east of the Tollgate Islands, peaked at a Hmax of seven metres and HS at three metres on Saturday evening so conditions were favourable for getting “conditions.” We paddled out of Caseys Beach as the sand on our local beach is not really sand but a coarse grit (all the sand has been dragged out by frequent storms recently) and in bigger swells, can have an annoying dumpy wave.
My plan was to paddle out to the Tollgate Islands, head south for an hour or two, find a beach to stretch and drink tea (always more important to me than food) and head back closer inshore. Inshore (west) of Black Rock as you paddle past Mosquito Bay the sea floor is dotted with reefs and rocky islets in shallow water of only 5 to 10 metres. In conditions, these break crazily, and, on rare occasions we have been forced to paddle around the east side of Black Rock. Conditions, however, were pretty much absent and it was a routine uneventful paddle.
Monday we cracked on climbing. Doug and I are good at cracking on. I have been known to tie into the end of the rope before Doug has got off abseil from his pitch. Seven pitches near or - given the number of times I fell - beyond my limit. I was irrationally scared on the first pitch which I top-roped as Doug led the route. Fear is like that: irrational. The likelihood of you getting Covid at this late stage in the “pandemic” (I don’t think I’ll ever not put “pandemic” in quotation marks) with any serious sequealae is vanishingly small, and yet we are still exhorted to wear masks (don’t work) and take “vaccines” (still a dangerous experiment with the vaccinnee as subject).
I dislike fear. It drives irrational behaviour which is almost always counter-productive. When fear is overwhelming - as a terminally nervous climber I’ve felt overwhelming fear too many times - options narrow to such an extent that it can become impossible to see a way forward. It’s visceral when you are rock climbing – suddenly the wall you are on becomes blank and there are no holds anywhere, you could be climbing a vertical or even overhanging mirror. As fear deepens, your legs shake, your hands sweat, your breath becomes shallow and panicky, your vision literally narrows to a pinprick. None of these reactions are conducive to best performance or even mediocrity. It’s a terrible experience, the opposite of flow. If I could never feel fear again, I would.
Fear, of course, is a response to risk, a theoretical concept that humans are even worse at quantifying than we are at determining how many genders exist. Some risks are wholly imagined, such as falling while on a top-rope climb, while others are very real, hearing the deafening crack as the snow slope above you fractures. Most risks are in the grey middle zone wherein our intuitions play havoc with reality. We often classify risks as real versus perceived as if we could wipe away fear by cognitive semantics. Sometimes, we can wrangle our brain into submission and quiet the fear response by separating real from perceived risks, but when fear is too full blown, this seldom works. In this state, we simply cannot think clearly, and it is the emotion we need to address not the objective reality of the risk.
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