Westway Sports Centre, West London, 15 December 2002

The Westway is undoubtedly the best climbing wall in the South East. Although barely two years old, it is proving to be well managed and helpful to its customers. Even the Christmas decorations (long thin red lights screwed to the walls at just above head height) have helped a little with the heating problem.

There is, however, one significant problem; it's very awkward to drive to.

I have tried many ways of getting there, none of them very convenient, but never been confident enough to drive through central London. Well this trip presented the opportunity to try this out.
With Mr Charley's local knowledge and thorough experience of the route, Mr Shepperson, Mr Cousins and I followed him across the Monopoly board to a safe arrival at the Westway.

Having made our team's opinion of the problems at round 3 to all and sundry, we were expecting some tougher challenges this time. Zippy and Rob had listened to our comments and we were not disappointed. The standard of the problems was markedly improved; both in quality and difficulty. Zippy had created some imaginative and hard-to-read problems that levelled the playing field for all competitors. Our team spent longer than usual studying the individual challenges and many looked quite serious as they acted out the moves in the air while studying the holds.

The cold didn't seem to worry the climbers, although some of the judges looked like they were suffering from frostbite. Mr Charley, Mr Shepperson and Mr (PE) Jones did long, brave stints as judges in the chilly but thankfully dry atmosphere (it often rains inside at the this wall). Matt Cousins did have to take time out to warm his toes (and shoes) on the radiators in the heated part of the Centre but, generally, the need to keep to the usual tight timetable had everyone on the move most of the time.

Joel Charley, Callum Harris, Nathan Kemp and Daniel Shepperson found things pretty tough but nevertheless gained a great deal of experience on the excellent problems.
With so many good friends at these competitions (not just from Dane Court), our competitors have a good day even when they have a low score.

Russ Bates, Matt Cousins, Tony Musselbrook and Chris Powell climbed really well; rising to the challenges, and someone must have hit Joe Cook's Go-Button because he finished a much-improved third with Tony.

All but one of the Head-to-Head competitors was a Dane Court climber; impressive.

The harder problems pulled the average score down by around 40 points but nobody minded.
I think some of our high scorers were a little bothered by Toms Arnold and Clowney beating them into the top two places but they were on their home turf and really did climb exceptionally. We won't let it happen again, will we?

Mr Alderson

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