French, German, Indian, Polish

A weekend outing with a french, german, Indian and Polish. No wonder I had so much trouble remembering names.. No excuses anyway, Emon rang me up and ask if i could run a multi pitch training for them before they head to Krabi. I thought it was a great way to spend a weekend and I could even offer to take them out to Dairy Farm for a first hand experience to get more hands on!

So we decided to meet up at Yishun Safra at the usual training ground, the slab wall. This wall is grossly under utilized and the last time I used it was to learn how to lower out from a pendulum with Kelly before our El Cap trip. I got to know the wall really well when I ran a few trainings with Kim Boon on the 25m tower of Yishun Safra.

The sharing session was all basic things that you need to know about before climbing a multi pitch, build anchors, top belay, lead climbing, abseiling and more. Sounds simple but there is more topics than we realized that we have to cover. We spend the entire morning running through basics and doing mock multi pitch on the wall before rain god decided he was too kind to us and decided to take a dump on us. We waited for 2 hours for the rain to stop before continuing our mock trainings till about 5pm. By the time we left there was absolutely nobody else in Yishun Safra. We were pretty wet and it seems like the rain drove everyone away.

Following day, determined not to get rained out, we met at DF (Dairy Farm) at 0830hrs(so much for an early start) took a short walk to Nose before putting up gears for the guys to lead the first pitch sports climbing style. Jens was the first to jump on the route despite not climbing outdoors for a long time. It was a great climb and everyone got to the top of pitch one without any problems. No one freak out, drop belay device or forgot how to belay from the top means that the previous day’s training was good.