Solo climbing a bridge roof crack | Just go BIG

I don't have a rope, I don't have any rack, so I'm just going to have to go big, just big straight away, and just bosh out the solo basically, yeah, yeah, go big, go big and go home, it's always a way isn't it? Unless I can find some sort of punt on the path to belay me, or a passerby, or a dog, just leash a dog to the side, use it as counterbalance. It would be good if Tom was here, I could get a belay and send him along first, so he can clean the jams, tell him where all the hard parts are, and hopefully take the dunk first. So, we're going to go down, we're going to have a gander, we, I am going to go down, we're going to have a gander, and hopefully we're going to come back dry, is the main objective, dry and ticked, yes, bish bash bosh. So the route I was going to try was this route here, which is a bridge roof crack in Edinburgh, and this had originally been climbed a few weeks before I was there by Robbie Phillips. Robbie cleaned and climbed the route firstly on Tradgear, and when he climbed it they actually use a mixture of cams and hexes, and the reason they used hexes was because the crack actually opens up inside, and it opens up so much that the gear can actually start to walk, it umbrellas out in the top of the crack, and then falls out the crack, so I think a couple of times they actually had some gear ripping on them, and they took a few dunks into the canal. He then came back a week or so later and climbed the route on Solo, and solo'd across it, obviously for me seeing a shallow water solo, which was a 10 or 12 metre roof crack in the UK, I was immediately psyched, and I basically, so yeah, I kind of tottered over there by myself, and decided to climb the thing. In classic style, when I got there, I'd flippin' forgotten any tape, or any crack gloves, because the edge of the crack is actually a little bit sharp, and it's quite slick inside, it's like slick concrete, it would have been quite nice to have crack gloves, like the rubber on the back of the crack gloves, against the slick concrete, would have probably been quite grippy. The only other crack that I've done like this, this sort of urban roof crack, was actually in Belgium, and it was on this route called Ticket Crack, which my friend Sean did, it was basically a much longer version of this. On the very far end of it, you end up crossing a road, and there's, if you're lucky or unlucky, then there's either cars or no cars going underneath you. And when I was just about to go over the road, this police car drove past, and obviously I didn't want to blow it, because I'd already climbed maybe 15 metres of roof crack to get there. And the policeman just stopped, he got out of the car, looked at me, and he was sort of really bemused, didn't really know what the heck was going on, there was two people below me, dragging these bouldering pads underneath me as I was crossing this road. This policeman stood there thinking, hmm, what do I do here, some guy climbing up some random crack, and then he just sort of looked at me for 5 or 10 seconds, got back in the car and then drove off, and I finished the route across the road. And that's the only other urban crack that I've ever climbed. The size of the crack starts out at reds, which for me is like a thin handjam, and there's a few moves of red size, and then it goes to gold, and you get really good handjams. And then in the middle it goes to blues, which are quite cupped handjams, but you can actually push your arm all the way into the crack, and there's a little rail inside, and you can grab this rail, so it actually makes the middle bit reasonably straightforward, because there's a good rail inside the crack. And then it narrows down again, and you get to golds, here you can have a little bit of a rest, and the handjams are good, you take a little bit of rest just before you head over the pavement, and when you head over the pavement then the crack narrows slightly and it goes back to tight hands, so a red size, and it's actually here where you need to be the most careful, because I guess you're a little bit tired, it's gone to a slightly harder size, and then you also don't have the protection of the water underneath I guess you, so here I was actually being the most careful not to cop it onto my back into the middle of the pavement if there was loads of walkers or cyclists coming past. As I was crossing the path at the other side, I had an absolute cracker. These three ladies were walking down the path, and one of them said to this other lady, Ooh, that's quite impressive isn't it? And the other lady just sort of like looked round and turned round to the other lady, she's like, hmm, yeah, but it's not exactly El Cap is it? And I was just climbing across the pavement at this time, and I just thought, oh, that's an absolute corker, that's brilliant, yeah, totally made my day. So there we have it, a cheeky little bridge crack shallow water solo. For more crack schools, cracky stuff, hand jammy off with the random shenanigans, then don't forget to subscribe, and I will see you all soon, my little crack swimmers, goodbye.