Wow! That's big!

If you haven't heard, the new Deopt up in Manchester has recently opened and meant to be one of the largest in the UK.

Steve Dunning and team were the guys that built VauxWall and being the supportive guys that we are, Tom decided to pay for our trip up there for their Opening Comp! Unfortunately only three of us headed up but nonetheless, Jack and I headed up, leaving at ridiculous o'clock to be there for when it started. Pulling up, the centre doesn't look that big on the outside but jeez! As soon as you go through the doors it's huge! It's kinda like two and a half centres crammed into one.

We scope out the 30 blocks which go up by difficulty order. Some at around the 20 mark looked absolutely nails! We get on a few warm up problems and straight into some mid grade stuff. After not properly competing in about a year and worried about injury, I was shaking like something more shakey than a leaf! I don't know what I was nervous about really but although some blocks looked hard, they were fine! Easily droppable but not too hard. We progress up a bit and decide to skip for problem 28 before it got greasy... It was this slab problem with some small crimps with high feet and a big move out. Definitely not my style but a bit more of Jacks. We try anyway but no luck. After, we drops back down a couple grades and work our way up.

Tom eventually turned up, when Jack and I were near finishing our hard blocks. In the end I finished with 240 (flashing everything from 1-24) out of 300, should've gotten at least 257 which would have put me 13th/103 instead of 30th - there were a lot of draws.

Onto the finals, you could probably guess 2 guys that got through and a few of the females. I'm not too keen on the ones who got the highest score going last as it then gets a little predictable on who's going to win. Barrans flashed all the blocks, Nathan or "MutantFeather" came fairly close. Everyone topped the first block for the females, I think a few topped the second and no one topped the last.

To watch the video from the event, click below. You may be able to spot me in the background representing Vaux ;)
https://www.facebook.com/The-Depot-Manchester-406388142878412/videos

All in all, it's a brilliant centre that's huge and had great setting, angles and a good range of shapes! Problems were very show-piecey and the mats were solid which my knees didn't enjoy at all! Will hopefully be back there soon and would definitely like to set there in the future! Congrats to Steve!

Just to give you a sense of size. If you look in the far left of the pic, you can just see where it opens up into another part of the centre which is of similar size and where the training boards and auto-belays are.