If I was a gambling man I would have put money on us breaking through tonight. With Luke bailing at the last minute it was down to Rob and I (TAP) to take the lead and do what we do best and take the glory! Plus it was the night before the Eldon AGM so it was almost a dead cert.
With Loper Lust still sumped the plan was for Rob to head down first with his small pump around 20 minutes before me so that the sump would be lowered when I arrived, meaning we could head straight to the sharp end and have a good dig with a view of possibly making the pub. We failed on this. I arrived at Loper Lust and there was approximately 10 cm of airspace. I headed straight through but once in the water the airspace thinned considerably meaning it was pretty much a free dive. We continued to lower the level of the sump by leaving the syphon going and headed off for Vulgarious.
Once at the dig face we took it in turns firstly to dig away the mud bank on the left. This gave us room to access the dig proper and a little dig in the floor underneath a projection of rock gave us proper access to the tube beyond. Now it got interesting. The dig was half full of liquid mud with a solid face in front. The route appeared to head left under a curtain of rock, but to access this we had to dig another foot forwards. Flat out in the tube was alright the first couple of attempts but it soon turned into a duck. Entering the tube created a bowel wave engulfing the whole dig face whilst submerging half of your own face which proved tricky. Exiting the dig with spoil in your hands was also tricky and it soon became obvious that the person behind had to drag their colleague from the dig by their feet whilst cupping all the spoil so it could be removed from the tube. Saying that by the time the spoil had been dragged through the water it was already slop and was useless for stacking or doing anything with other than adding to the height of the muddy duck.
It seemed like we'd almost given up due to the need of removing some of the liquid mud to make digging conditions more desirable. Rob jumped back in for one last look and armed with the hammer he pushed what mud he could to one side and bashed the rock curtain for further measure, he could now see clearly a bedding beyond with a potential way off to the right. He shouted back that he was going to go for it and after a few more scoops of chocolate he pushed through.
Comfortably he turned around after a brief look beyond and started to dig the constriction out for me to join him. After only a minute and a little more persuasion with the hammer, he shouted for me to join him nonchalantly. I wasted no time and started my way through the tube to the constriction. The passage seemed very similar to the long passage beyond For Buck's Sake. Once I was through the curtain all I could see were Rob's feet in front of me. Heading off to the right and after a couple of body lengths the passage opened up vastly. Here Rob was lying on his back grinning looking up at the roof towards nothing special. It was here I realised we'd done it!
Giggling Rob sat back up and we both look to head at the passage stretching off in front of us, only a couple of feet ahead. Could we see evidence that someone had already been here? A couple more feet down the passage and it was blatantly obvious that we had now entered The Stoney Middleton Master Cave! Rob now stormed off down the passage at a brutal pace and I try to follow my lamp being absorbed by the mud. Everything just looked dark. We came to a junction and the passage grew enormously. We were now in A Race Against Time passage and had hit our target from the survey precisely on the dot.
Giggling whooping jumping about and eventually submerging ourselves in the large pool of water in front of us. We couldn't believe it! It almost seemed too easy that we were now stood here. Passage to passage Vulgarious must be close to 80 m long! And it sure is a beast of a passage. After a brief celebration, now knowing we probably won't make the pub, it was time to reap our reward. We headed upstream towards Sump 2 and our next project which will take us to the Master Cave proper. This looked a glorious looking sump from the squalor we'd just come through. It seemed almost bizarre after crawling in mud for years that we'd find ourselves in a lovely clean washed streamway. The upstream sump is not far from the entrance to Vulgarious and after Rob had a quick dive we started to head downstream. This passage felt humongous and we stomped our way down it jumping in the pools until we met a collapse where the second passage headed off towards Cussey with further potential prospects for exploration. Here we first checked out a climb in the roof of a boulder choke. The root up was slippy, so 5 minutes worth of digging under the boulder gained us access to a further climb up to our goal. Here a further climb led to a drafting choke in the boulders whilst a bedding headed left, but again choked. At the base of the climb, a clean washed rift headed left which looks like an exciting prospect, albeit probably will link with something we already know.
With a check of the time we decided to head downstream and follow it to the Boil-up sump. The passage was beautiful, lovely, clean washed with the best shell bed I have ever seen in a cave. The passage seemed to go on and on but eventually feeling the fatigue from not crawling for a long while we found ourselves in the sump pool which leads to the boil up. Rob and I still savouring the breakthrough had a little lads moment here before before we eventually decided to head back out. We reached the junction of Vulgarious by 10:15 p.m. Vulgarious itself took 15 minutes to get through, then a further 30 minutes to exit the cave. Breaking surface around 11:00 p.m. after a quick wash we cracked open the beers and celebrated in style with an ice cold Hobgoblin.
Unfortunate that none of us had camera gear to capture any of this in real time, but only an after photo to show the emotion and the filth.
Another classic TAP trip in the bank and another one I'll never forget.
