Float The Boat 2012

This past Saturday was a beautiful day in Atlanta for the annual Float The Boat bouldering competition at Boat Rock! Boat Rock is one of my personal favorite areas to boulder in the Southeast, and Float The Boat is my favorite comp every year (yep, even more than the Triple Crown comps), mainly because of the similarity to the style of bouldering common in the Upstate and Jocassee Gorges that is dominated by slab problems. I didn't make it to last years comp, so this is the first year I've competed in the "Geritol" division (for all of y'all out there that didn't realize I was that old school) which is for folks 35 and up. You can see the crowd gathering before the comp and some shoe companies offering demo shoes to try out during the comp in the picture above. I didn't get any pictures of actual climbing during the comp, because I was too busy climbing. I ended up getting the highest score I had ever gotten in the comp, which was very satisfying considering that I haven't been able to do much bouldering in the last month or so, and in the process I sent a couple of new routes I hadn't sent before. My biggest point routes among my 10 routes that counted were Deweese Slab V4 (new route for me) and Marvin Webb Slab V3/4, and then I filled in the rest of my score card with a bunch of V3's (Nosey Women, which was the other new route for me, The Shield, Yellow Mon, Spiderman, Lost Digits, Rockhouse Traverse, Sourwood Arete, and Dream Scoop). When it was all over, I was very close to a podium spot (less than 20 points away if I read the final score tallies correctly), so I ended up settling on 4th out of around 10 or so competitors in my division. I love to try to compete at a comp, but its usually just with myself, but I was hoping that I had done enough to get at least 3rd...even though I fell short, I had a great time, I still beat my personal best from previous years, and feel even more motivated for next years comp.

Now to turn the focus back to local areas and projects (found a sweet new boulder with 4 awesome projects, only a 5 minute walk from my house) before this warm winter heats up even more and puts a premature end to the Southeast bouldering season. The CCC and I are still in the process of working towards access in the State Parks and on State Forest lands and hopefully will have some new news by the time the Jocassee Gorges Trail Day comes around on March 24th!