Telendos!

We scootered down to the Myrties dock relatively early, with the plan of biting the bullet and paying to charter a boat to Irox.  Since our last trip to Kalymnos without kids, there has been a lot of development on Telendos, with several completely new and spectacular looking crags.  We didn't make it to any of them last year because of a lack of time and complicated logistics, but we were determined to do so this year.  Particularly since Aris had recommended a way of staying out of the sun and sampling the best of the new stuff.  As we were driving through Myrties, we saw a family of climbers, who we cornered at the pier to see where they were going.  Then more climbers showed up and soon we had a large number of people going to the crag, which meant we all paid a lot less.  Along the way we talked to the climbing family, who were from Sweden (Actually the father was an Aussie).  It was their second or third trip to the island, with three kids!  The mother mentioned that they were thinking about staying even longer next time (three weeks), which elicited an audible groan from their teenage daughter.  I guess Kalymnos isn't quite as exciting for teenagers as it is for climbing parents!  Anyway, as we were steaming towards the drop off point, the boat skipper motioned to me, pointed to the tiller, put it in my hand, pointed towards a narrow finger of the island and said "straight"!  I was surprised to discover how much turning the tiller required just to keep the boat straight, but managed to not crash into anything, despite being totally drunk (just kidding, mom!).  Meanwhile, the skipper was readying the front of the boat for what would be an exciting disembark.  Here's Cap'n Max in action. Arrrr

Eventually the skipper came back, steered us around the last bluff and began the disembarking.  This consisted of delicately steering the bow (that's the front for you non Cap'n Max landlubbers) into the rocks with just enough throttle to make sure there was no gap between the boat, a tire and the rocks and then having all the climbers jump off the boat.  From there, it was a twenty minute walk up to the Lambda crag: brilliant long routes on excellent rock. 

Even the warm ups were decent.  We did Hot Chili, General and then Al Alamein (spectacular!) before the sun arrived and we moved down to Pescatore. 

(that's just the sign for Pescatore)
We ran into an American lady who was on her last hurrah before med school at Stanford.  She and a French dude had walked from the normal Telendos ferry "terminal" for an hour and a half, which did not look like fun in the full sun.  At Pescatore we only had time for one route, called OTR:  a decent but soapy tufa climb.  Somehow I ended up getting pretty pumped on this one, but hung on.  Chloe bitterly cursed it. 

Next: Irox!


We had been hearing about a really nice 6b called Magma, so got right on it.  The opening move was slick with the heat and humidity, but fine after that.  A pretty unique climb, but I have to admit that it was far from my favorite of the day.  After resting and shooing away some very aggressive goats

We did Helvet-X which is probably one of my favorite 6c's ever:  diverse movements on excellent rock.

Next: Kyprios Angel which was also really good but not quite as good as Helvet-X
All in all a fantastic (and full) day of climbing.  Kudos to the developers.
The boat showed up right on time and we did the reverse of the unloading process