My first caving trip of the year due to working away, and probably last one for a few weeks, so i was keen to progress with my main project at the moment. With being sumped out the last two attempts i was very sad for it to rain for 48 solid before the trip. I nipped over in the afternoon in my civi’s and confirmed the entrance was sumped. Big sad.
However Chris was super keen to go digging anyways so we hatched a plan to start digging a sump bypass. If successful it could mean unlimited access to BWS which would be positive for my mental health.
Pre-beers in the car were great but listening to the rain made us think Jim probs had the best idea to not bother. However we bucked up and headed into the cave. There's a flatout entrance crawl, only about 10m long, which soon drops a couple metres into Ward Wins Crawl, which is the currently sumped gate. However straight on the passage continues, to the left totally flatout and too low after only a few metres, but to the right the passage has a good trench and allows for a couple body lengths of a small, enthusiastic explorer. This is our target, and seemingly quite exciting tonight with a good strong draught coming out. There is also lots of flood debris pushed into the crack at the end suggesting that it take quite a flow in big flood.
I head in first while Chris sets up a nice base camp ready to pass me gear. My first cap was poorly placed and the mat got stuck on a protrusion. Thankfully Chris had a second capping set so i could cap the protrusion off allowing the first cap to then fire successfully. Lucky! I passed the spare set back to him and he was able to have a blast at an annoying boulder behind me making it much more comfortable for me to dig ahead. The next cap I did was surprisingly powerful and had a different scent, possibly of camomile and vanilla, at which point Chris owned up to passing me his extra sparky caps instead of mine. They are certainly better, if not a lot scary. A few more caps ahead and we swapped.
The base camp is indeed very comfortable. It is precariously perched directly above the sump but there’s plenty of ledges and even a vintage tractor style seat to perch on. Chris made light work of the road ahead, widening the trench to a comfortable crawl. It’s probably 1.5m now to the far end, which will probably be reached in a couple trips. TBH it doesn’t look really exciting, but until we get there and pull out the flood debris it’s impossible to say. We were still quite keen to dig but the pub was calling, more specifically the agreed time to meet Jon and Jim, so we headed out. It was a really good little social too, glad the guys came to join us.
