I saw a picture in the guidebook to climbing in Pembrokeshire of a woman looking slightly stressed and surrounded by rock and thought : “there’s no way I’m doing that, it looks more like caving and I’m scared of enclosed spaces”. Over the next couple of days I kept being drawn back to that page and the diagram of the route going in and out of the rock and I wanted to see what it looked like in real life. And I wanted to do something a bit different and exciting. Howard, one of our fellow climbers, asssured me that it was “more like tunnelling than caving” which for some reason made me feel more enthusiastic about doing it. I have since realised that Howard’s soothing tones and deadpan understatement are not to be trusted.
Finding ourselves very near this route one day me and Rob decided to give it a go. We offered our friend Henry the chance to join us and he said that he was “not terribly keen” so we left the rest of the club members and set off to find the Sea tube. The problem was that it’s by its very nature hidden inside the rock so a lot of wandering about the cliff top ensued. This culminated in my standing on a headland and gesturing to Rob “left a bit, right a bit..” until he was above it. Like a rocky episode of Golden Shot for you 70’s kids.
We then (mainly Rob) set up an abseil which took ages as some of the rocks were rather loose and unconvincing. Eventually Rob abseiled down and stood on the beach. He was doing a lot of arm flapping at this point and I could tell that he wasn’t sure about something but I didn’t know what. He then indicated that I should follow and I went down past the entrance to the sea tube and down to the beach. The issue was that it wasn’t much of a beach by then, more of a shallow sea with waves washing right up to the cliff. We’d intended to climb at low tide but with all the faffing the tide had now turned and it comes in super fast as we’d seen in the previous few days. There had been talk of it having the second highest tidal coefficient in the world.
We considered our options, going back up the ab rope was one, but that seemed like hard work. And would have been very disappointing and probably quite slow. So we decided to climb it. There was a slab from the beach up to the mouth of the tube that had been washed very smooth by the sea and was beautiful. We ran through the water and got up that and set up a belay at the bottom of the tube. The view over to the rocks looking out to the left of this stance was amazing, all bits of rock and sky and sea making spectacular shapes jumbled together.
The entrance to the tube was intimidatingly narrow and steep and smooth. I decided that I didn’t want to lead it with the time pressure but neither did I want to belay just above an incoming tide for too long. I was feeling a bit sick at the thought of being inside the tube with the sea coming up into it. I started planning my escape from the belay if the tide came up to where I was and settled on swimming out. We decided to do it in two pitches as there was a good stance at the end of the first tube.
Rob then set off and squirmed his way into the tube. The getting in was tricky but once in it was possible to brace body parts against the sides of the rock and feel fairly secure. He told me it was like crawling but the angle was fairly steep and never felt like a crawl to me. More of an undignified vertical grovel. The good thing was that we could see the end of it and it was fairly light inside so I didn’t get too terrified. I still laughed slightly hysterically once I’d got my body into the tube. Then I sang a bit to keep myself happy. The surface at the bottom was smooth and rippled so I did imagine that I might be squeezing myself through a giant colon. I had thought of rebirth but constipation might be more apt. Before leaving that tube I vowed never to go caving, I think I’d go into full on panic underground in the dark.
Once we’d both escaped the first tube I led the second one which was a breeze, much wider. By the time I got out of it I was so relieved that I scrambled up the rest of the climb to the top without placing any more gear and was then far above the abseil point so I had another scramble back down and belayed Rob from there. Done and dusted, my strangest climb so far. It was exciting and a bit crazy and I’d love to try another one. Just not yet.
idrathereatgrass 