Going Sideways

Somewhere in the back of the Swanage guidebook is this intriguing entry:

"La Traversée Intégrale De La Pointe Ballard À La Pointe Handfaste

4000 feet V Diff

Calm seas and an aptitude for both swimming and the French language are required. The name explains the line. The grade is 'very sporting' and will require lots of swimming. Further details are left for you to explore."

Let me just highlight the salient points here "Swimming", "Sporting", "Swimming". Sounds like my kind of route.

Surprisingly it took very little persuasion to rope Steve into this little escapade too, which is why we found ourselves walking to the far end of Swanage beach on a sunny Sunday morning looking at the huge chalk cliffs looming above us. On the walk over from the car park at Studland we had peaked over the cliff to check out the route a couple of times but had decided that this was a bad idea as from the top it looked tantamount to impossible. Now at the beginning things where looking a little bit more agreeable. We scrambled over chalk boulders until it got slopey enough to put on rock boots. After a short interlude we carried on scrambling until we where faced with a vertical chalk wall. We were going to have to climb. Being a born leader I let Steve go first. The wall was made of surprisingly hard chalk which actually stayed in place rather than fall off in great chunks, which was nice. It was well endowed with chunky holds and the sea a meter or so beneath us made the climbing very atmospheric.

Sooner or later it had to happen. And it had to happen to me. Steve had just finished a rather hard section of the traverse (graded V. Diff my arse) . It was my turn to make a series of tricky moves to a crack and then move gracefully onto the ledge, well that was the theory. In practice it was a little different. Steve in-between peels of laughter said that my face was a picture of surprise the moment I came away from the rock, Luckily for me he hadn't wound the camera on so there is no evidence of the first wetting. The laughing soon stopped when Steve realised that the next section involved a lot of swimming!

From now on the route was mainly in the water. Either swimming round the chalk caverns and coves, hopping from underwater boulder to underwater boulder or clinging to the edge and "Swim-Climbing" as we christened it. We got to walk on some very secluded and exclusive beaches and found a nice ledge to have a picnic on an review the ridiculousness of our exploits. Every now and again one of the Studland water sports brigade would pull there boat up close and ask if we were OK. I guess the big grins on our faces gave away the fact that we where doing this for fun.

All too soon it was over. We rounded the headland looked back at old harry and headed for the beach, some dry clothes and a pint. But in the back of my mind I was wondering how hard it would be to scale the sea stacks we had passed …..

Pete