Tuesday 21st October – Dave Nixon, Henry Rockliff, Rob Eavis

Another Giants trip to clean the Crusader mud off our gear, this time with significantly higher water levels to through in a bit of excitement at Garlands. Moose and Henry went in first, with me joining them later. However because they didn’t know the last station from the trip before, they started at the start of the Chamber of Horrors and worked their way back. This meant that if I left them long enough I would meet them once they were back through the Windpipe!

However when they started, their recently calibrated DistoX would not turn on! Changing batteries didn’t help, it turned out that the contacts on the battery compartment needed bending back into place, meaning that they then had to recalibrate the system again! Therefore by the time I’d got to the Windpipe there was no sign of them so I had no excuse but to get wet. I met them just before North East Swallet…

Typical banter started and we all enjoyed the surveying out. It was nice to actually move through this bit of cave slowly, as it’s very impressive in places. There’s also quite a few bits going off to the south that I’d not noticed before that I’d be keen to give a look. From a formation perspective it’s more complicated than I previously thought, with the phreatic counterpart being lost in a number of places, suggesting potential for new stuff.

Once at the surface we tied last trip’s first station in with a high accuracy GPS fix done last week, allowing for all the new data to be imported into the mast file. This morning was the moment of truth. Will the entrance to the Chamber of Horrors connection now line up with the Oxlow data? No, not at all. A 30m horizontal error! So better than it was, but still very very poor. So there lies some error somewhere in the system still. Only bits of the loop that are not in “new” data are Pilgrims Way and the Chamber of Horrors connection. Let’s hope the error is in Pilgrim’s Way!!!

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