By Felicity Wills, 14 March 2025
After a week of recovering from freshers (my voice came back yay!), handing in assignments, and many emails later, Rockcraft had finally arrived. After funnelling 60-ish people into various cars, everyone made their way to Pukerua bay in search of that sweet sweet greywacke. The 20-30 min walk along the coast to the crag was stunning and was funny to see so many trotting down single file. A group of leaders had gone ahead earlier to set up the top ropes so when we arrived we were straight into groups: complete beginners, a bit of experience, and somewhere in between. We went through the basics: figure 8, stopper knots, belaying, checking and calls. Most people managed to pick it up pretty quickly, perhaps thanks to the 42 people we managed to shuttle down to Hangdog the previous Wednesday. There was definitely still some questionable belaying in the beginning but we had a great group of leaders teaching and supervising everyone up the wall. Eventually, after everyone had a couple of goes up some walls we could relax slightly and got stuck into the true climbing routine (20% climbing 80% yapping) which was great. We weren't able to migrate to the corner with some harder climbs as a couple unfortunate non VUWTC climbers had posted up there. So we tried the alleged grade 19 on the learning wall where we learned that either the trusted ‘theCrag’ website had lied to us or we were doing it wrong (it was quite soft). The expected showery weather thankfully held out on us and once the tide was low a large portion of our group went to summit the island as well as the hill behind us (we are still the tramping club after all). Once everyone had had enough climbing and scrambling we packed up cleaned the routes and made the walk back to the carpark where I hoped someone had left my car keys (they had!). Overall, a successful trip, no deaths or even injuries, I perhaps can’t say the for later in the evening at TrampsTrampsTramps lol.
