6th August 2014 – Rob Eavis, Simon Gant
Dave was supposed to be joining us, and indeed he brought me to the cave, but a phone call on the way indicated his principal requirement was indeed back at home with a poorly baby, so he dropped me off and fled. This changed our plan somewhat, as the intension was to photograph the findings, an objective best done with two assistants, ideally with one being an original discoverer. Simon offered to use my camera to photograph me, but that wasn’t going to pass for many reasons, so in the end it was with little reluctance that I left the heavy camera gear behind and simply carried in a small trenching tool. Let’s go digging!
We've streamlined the rigging down to one tacklebag of rope, and can now easily rig down to the pull through up in sub 30 mins. Staging our Lucozade cache here we melted our way along Pilgrims Way and down North Pitch. Then back up the pitch to recollect the tacklebag, then back down and onwards.
I realised that now my 4th trip down here, I’d never actually looked down any of the side passages, always b-lining straight to the end. Along the main Main Stream Passage there are 3 inlets coming in from the west, so we took the time this trip to explore the first. It leads for a short distance to a large aven up with water dripping down. A low crawl continues on from the base which soon opens at a T-junction. Going left first, the floor of the stooping sized passage slowly drops away in a scarily inviting way, precariously popping out in the roof of the 6m high passage just before North Pitch. Back and right at the T-junction goes through another low crawl to an awesomely clean drop down 6m into North Chamber. I remember looking up into this passage from below and thinking how good it looks, it really is just a square passage heading into a solid, flat wall. The result of this connection is that we now have a shortcut to get to our dig, which means that instead of a pitch down and then ferreting up through some arduous rifts, we can now simply prussic up this lovely pitch out of North Chamber and crawl for 10m. I’d estimate a saving of 5-10 minutes each way.
Time was moving on and Simon was keen on being out of the cave by midnight if possible, so we headed quickly on to the digging face. As I sunk the first spade into the muddy fill I wondered how often people get to be the first to dig a new dig. The mud fell apart easily and, taking it in turns, within 45 minutes we’d progressed ~2m into the tube. 1 metre further on from the face the mud is replaced with clean washed rocks, plus one big boulder that is definitely bigger than the passage (!?!), so it looks like things are about to change. Also I think there’s an echo, a belief I’ll hopefully echo next trip.
Uneventful trip out, apart from how astonishingly amazing the Lucozade was before the prussic out. On surface by 11:49pm.