The Reich digs, at the western end of Brooklands Straight, are 3 similar constrictions at different elevations. This direction appears to be downstream and all 3 draught, but other than that probably most people would happily call it the end of the cave. Thankfully, that’s where the Eldon begin.
Last week Jon and Joe went photoing in the Far Left leaving me to spend a happy couple hours capping the righthand wall of 2nd Reich. This made about 600mm of progress widening the rift, although not very exciting as you can fit about 2m passed this point to where it gets really tight.
Looking out of 2nd Reich at Joe, by RobE
After Joe had a fight with his shower and unfortunately came off worse I was on my own tonight. To be honest, this dig is very much a one man party, so that suited me fine. It had rained all day (42mm in 24 hours!) and the waterfall was flowing well. V2 was taking all the stream leaving V1 nice and dry still, but there was some evidence that some water had flown down Brooklands Straight recently.
Excitedly upon arriving at the dig there was an obvious rumble coming from ahead. I squeezed to the front, filming for the Team, and clearly a stream can be heard flowing ahead. Water sounds are very hard to decipher, but this feels like it could well be a similar amount of water to that flowing down V2. Game on!
2 hours of capping later I’d made another 500mm ish although then wasted another hour with a snapper which didn’t fire, much to my annoyance. Then I realised that my jammer had fallen off my SRT kit in the entrance crawl so I had to improvise with a pantin to get up the 20m pitch. Nevertheless, a great session, although there’s lots to do to get through! I’ve never really started a mining project like this before so we’ll see how high the enthusiasm stays.