Plastic Fantastic kayaking event

Plastic Fantastic was held at the Nottingham Climbing Centre on Sunday 1st Feb, it was a mixed discipline competition and also a first for the climbing wall. It incorporated a bouldering, leading, dyno and speed climbing competition, and if that wasn’t enough just to top it all off we added a pull up comp with a case of beer attached at the end to you to finish you off! The centre was closed the afternoon before as we set all 25 boulder problems, 6 lead climbs, 2 dynos and 2 speed climbs, it was a very busy day!

The turnout was great with over 70 people competing in three different categories, Junior, Adult and Jurassic (40+). The Jurassic category was entertaining as only one of the competitors brought their glasses and so recorded the scores for everybody in this category (Dave Musgrove), it was very funny to watch and like he wasn’t going to win!

With teams like the Garden family turning up from Manchester, the Wolf Mountain Climbing Team from Birmingham and Team Strong from (Sheffield AKA Leah Crane and Dawid Skocylas) it was going to be an interesting comp for the junior and the adult category. Some members of the Nottingham Junior Climbing Team (Ed Mowbray, Luke Tilley and Ben Meakin) entered the adult category for the extra Challenge. well why not!

In the Jurassic category Alan Monks and Mike Mowbray tied in all the categories except for the Bouldering where Alan stormed ahead with 30 points clear of anyone else.

In the junior category there was no competition for the talents of Charlotte Garden who won in every event winning the junior female, placed second overall in the juniors, and placed 11th overall. Very impressive! Ailsa Graham and Naomi Tilley both members of the Nottingham junior team battled it out for second and third positions with Ailsa just sneaking in front for the final score.

Father and son Roger and Tom Bonnert both entered, Roger was in the Jurassic category but unfortunately had to pull out due to a finger injury and Tom who was in the junior won clearing up in all events followed very closely by Rick Bass and Orrin Coley.

In the adult female category the competition was between Leah Crane, Beth Monks and Ashleigh Naysmith all members of the British Climbing Team. With only one point to separate them between the Lead, dyno and speed it came down to the bouldering event where Leah got 11 points clear of Beth and 30 points clear of Ashleigh winning the event overall. Fran Santos came a respectable fourth position after putting in a very commendable effort.

In the male category it was going to be close between Dawid Skocylas AKA Polish Dave, Tom Gore and Paul Latham, they all scored the same on the dyno and lead climb and on the speed Tom dropped a point so again it came down to the bouldering. Dave managed to flash all but one boulder problem scoring an impressive 240 while Tom managed to sneak in front of Paul taking second place overall proving that taking your top off does give you extra power!

To finish off the day there was a pull up comp, at this point you think to yourself is anyone going to be able to do any pull ups after doing all the comp, then you had to put a rucksack on full of beer and see how many you could crank out! Well we had 10 pull ups, then 20, then 30, Dawid Skocylas popped over to crank out 40 but with an extremely impressive 50 pull ups was Tom Gore whose arms seemed ready to explode at the end but never have we seen him so happy about winning a prize as his face was when he won the beer!

All that was left was the prize giving and the raffle which thanks to Alpkit went on for longer than expected as they provided so many prizes so had to double them up at the end, maybe not something to complain about. A massive thanks to the sponsors, Alpkit, Nottingham Climbing Centre, Redbull, Uptosummit.com, DMM, Beyond Hope and Cotswold for providing prizes, being there and helping the general organising of the competition.