He was in the forest with Dave (Olbrechts) and Tim (Collier), all friends from my hometown Grimbergen and they were getting ready to climb.
Obviously I couldn't join them, but as they were staying for the long weekend (the first of May is Labour Day, a public holiday in most European countries), I promised to meet them at the bivouac of the Hippodrome de la Solle on Monday morning. This morning.
As promised, I arrived at about 10h30 and everyone was up, except for Dave.
It was a pleasant surprise to see that Stef (Jacobs) and family were there too.
Luckily it didn't take long before everyone was ready, and we agreed to go to the nearby Rocher Saint-Germain Est. An obvious choice for those who still have to drive back to Belgium.
Last night there was a lot of rain, but there was a lot of wind that thankfully had done a great job drying nearly all of the boulders in the area.
If the air humidity would have been about 10% lower, the conditions could have been great, but they weren't bad at all.
We walked straight to the boulder with "Magic Three", where I still had to finish the sitstart and Stef and Tim could try the standstart.
It didn't take long before Tim finished the standstart and started trying the sitstart with me.
Stef needed and found a different method, couldn't finish it, but there certainly is potential.
The first couple of moves from the sitstart into the standstart are not very hard, but they are quite physical and it's hard to link it all the way to the top. Maybe I should have eaten some breakfast in the morning?
A couple of times I fell off the last move, but after repeating the standstart again to memorise the correct sequence, I was finally able work my way through from the sitstart to the top soon after.
Tim got very close and will definitely do it on one of his next visits.
A very, very nice problem opened by the Belgians Jan (de Smit) and Wolff Braeckman.
Fontainebleau - Rocher Saint-Germain Est - Magic Three 7B+
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