And as the sun sets the timid boulderer comes out of his cave.

Last night was a first. Not a first ascent of a problem or of a grade but a first night time boulder session...

...and it was awesome!
I went up to Silverdale with GCW. He wanted to go to Warton to finish some long averdue business on Debaser LH (7b+) and I wanted to go to Trowbarrow and crush Iron Man (8a) to prove to myself that my aspirations weren't pie-in-the-sky. First stop Warton just as the sun was going down, G worked the moves a bit to warm up then my homemade portable sun (don't ask) was ignited and G got down to the serious business of falling off the last move. Awesome. After several successful "last move failures" we had confirmed G's fear of success so decided to move on. At Trowbarrow it became apparent that I to feared success as I failed to crush. I was actually quite pleased with my performance and I am confident that I can do this problem, just not last night.
Anyway the main point of last night was the torch experiment which was a resounding success. I was really pleased with the torch, the light is nice and powerful and it seemsd to just light up a boulder problem sized patch of rock really well. It lasted pretty well also. I think next time it would be nice to have a low lighting lantern for rest between attempts to conserve the batteries but otherwise spot on. I don't think it would work for a "lets just go and try a few problems and see what happens" session, it's quite a bit of faffing setting up the lights etc, but for a focussed "we're going to do this/these problems" session it's ideal. Also we were expecting video to be a complete disaster but it seems to work quite well, you appear to get quite moody atmospheric shots with really sharp shadows. I've only seen it on the camcorder screen so the true acid test will come when i get it onto the computer but i think the footage looked quite reasonable and the probable loss of image quality will be offset to an extent by the atmosphere (or at least I hope so). Anyway I'll probably edit the clips and upload something even though there was no success on the climbing front, just to show the success of the lantern session.
Right I've got a nappy to change, rock and roll...

And here is a (somewhat poor) video:

Iron Man Failure By Torchlight from nik jennings on Vimeo.