Jim Lister approached me with a very reasonable proposition. A few years ago some Eldon members found some cave in Spain which lead to a sump. Jim has planned to dive this sump, but the Eldon didn’t survey the section which ended in the sump. Therefore before Jim can dive he first has to get the sump added to the survey. His proposition is he’ll survey it, as long as he can use the Eldon DistoX and PDA (and get a lesson in using it). This trip is the lesson….

Whilst bouncing a few potential survey trip ideas around, the Buttered Badgers broke through in their dig at the bottom of Rowter. Mark Richardson needed this surveying and adding to the Peak-Speedwell Master file, so it seemed a perfect match. Also it meant me n Jim can go have a nose around their new stuff

Mark, Tim Allen and Mark Wright headed on down to start digging, whilst me n Jim headed to the Abyss to do the worst job of any DistoX user, calibration! Jim smashed out a delta 0.43 (a “very good” for all you non-geeks) allowing us to start putting a line down their dig. 13m of vertical shaft down (!) lead through into their new rift and streamway. This is awesome stuff, a beautiful natural streamway meandering down to the ESE, slowly arcing away from the Abyss boulder ruckle. It has elements similar to the Titan Streamway, albeit about 5 times smaller! We passed the diggers, who’d given up moving rocks about and now needed a pint to scratch their heads over. Me n Jim carried on down to the end, had a quick poke around the final boulder choke, then headed out.

On the way out we swapped instruments and put a line back from the dig to the entrance shaft, allowing us to tie it all in with the original data. So now Rowter is 100.36m deep, and I’m sure it won’t be long before its even deeper!

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