The only paddlers I saw on Sunday were a couple of young folk gearing up to take their white-water boats out in the surf at Bingie Point. It was pumping. There was a line of half a dozen breakers and the bigger sets were cresting and crashing up to half a kilometre off-shore. The tops were blowing off the waves and, at just about exactly low tide, the bigger waves were running right up to the top of the beach. The youth were either young and talented or young and foolish, I don’t know which. At least they knew what a bouldering pad was and didn’t ask why I was carrying a box on my back.
I trotted down to the boulders on the north side of Bingie Point thinking I’d climb all the low tide boulders first. If you don’t count climbing on my home wall or bouldering at indoor gyms, I haven’t been bouldering since April and I had almost forgotten how much fun it is. After some warm-ups, I got on some overhanging and steep stuff. I like trying hard close to the ground and I was stoked to top out some boulders that were a bit scary for a solo boulderer with no spotter. Scary but not as scary as heading out into the Bingie surf with a gale warning and a 5 metre swell, but then I’m not young anymore.
When I’m too tired to try hard, I always think, I’ll do some easy cool down boulders but, in the moment, that seems a bit boring, so I quit after a few hours and walked back to drink tea overlooking the beach. The youth were gone and there were no broken bodies or bits of boats on the shore. I hope they had fun trying hard. Like anything else if you keep practicing sooner or later trying hard becomes indistinguishable from having fun.
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