Gavin Grimmer
Apart from coming around a corner of a ridge and seeing a Stag about 20 foot in front of me, we did not come across anything of interest. I don’t know who got the biggest fright - the stag, or me!
We were fortunate to be offered a house to stay in both at Martin’s Bay and at Jamestown, and they both proved invaluable. (Many, many thanks to the owners).
We returned next morning to the base of the mountain from the house in Jamestown, unfortunately at about 11.00am as we had slept in (we had very little sleep for several days worrying about what may/may not happen).
Pictured here is Les on one of our occasional well earned short breaks from climbing,
well up the mountain.
We did not reach the area on the plateau (2500 feet) until 3.15pm after a grueling,, bush bashing, climb and sadly it started raining quite heavily from when we were at about the 2000ft mark, and it got rather dark as we were in cloud. I had hoped to take some photos in the area that we were searching, but due to the heavy rain, I didn’t want to risk water getting into the camera.
We both started getting very cold and had to put on more clothing. As we were unsure of how long it would take us to get down again, we set a deadline of setting off on our descent by 4.00pm at the latest. Consequently, we didn’t carry out a very good search but we did manage to get around most of the basic perimeter of the area with a metal detector.
From there we went straight over the edge down a near vertical mountainside although there were plenty of ferns, etc, to hang onto. The way I looked at it, the steeper the better as that meant you got down sooner. So long as it didn’t get to the point that you fell down, of course! We came across the odd bluff, but they were easily negotiable by going around them. After two hours we were back on the beach still in pouring rain, and set sail for Jamestown. After arriving, we thankfully found that we still had a few clothes that didn’t get wet.
After staying the night there, we set sail again for the house at Martins Bay and spent the rest of the day and night trying to get the rest of our clothes dry but to no avail.
We flew out the next morning, Monday, 14th February.
View looking up the stream to the north of the mountain
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