After our last trip to play on the fabulous tufas above the lower tier at Cave of Panagia I’d been pestering Jake to explore further with one of the multi-pitch adventures to be had there.

He kindly relented on his last day and we set off up Bernhault – Sinistrelle which takes the black left-trending line of tufas towards the right of the picture below in about 100m of 5c, 7a, 7a+.

The 5c was no kind of warm up for the 7a which followed, which felt more like 7a+/b with a couple of tough tufa bulges and then a thin crimpy pull. This is followed by another 10 metres of somewhat scary unprotected climbing on loose, damp and little-travelled (though easy) ground to the belay for the top pitch. All those adjectives looked to apply to the next 40m (except “easy” – it was clearly anything but…) and we applied some sound mountaineering judgement and reverted to a day of single pitching (there are plenty of loose adventures at home on Red Wall but not many 40m bolted tufas!)

Jake did the excellent Edlinger that I’d enjoyed a couple of weeks ago, and we both did Gullich, 7a. Here are a couple of shots showing the fine art of the sneaky rest, which really takes the sting out of the 15 degrees overhanging rock. First the “sit down on a huge lump” rest…

… and then the “lean backwards against a tree sized tufa” rest

As a final treat we finished off with Geneva Cayenne at Theos, which he agreed was a fitting end to a great (and highly productive) trip.