American summer, more Caving madness, broken hydraulics and beer!

So I applied for Camp work in the USA for the Summer of '12, its looking good at the moment, got through to the interview stage although it has to be done over Skype and my little netbook can't run it very well! Either way, it's in January and am looking forward to it! If all goes well ill be spending 3 and a half months in the US with 4 weeks of it travelling which will be nice!

On to the Caving, Mike and myself decided to go Caving the weekend just gone with Exeter Speleo Club, they were staying at the Belfry Caving Hut so it was promising even from the start! We left on the Saturday morning after I spent a good 2 hours faffing around in the A&E Club stores getting the kit sorted, on our way Mike wanted to buy an SRT kit so we popped into CaveClimb and spoke to Andy Sparrow. During our hour or so there we tried on SRT kits, both practiced on the shops pre-rigged course and eventually Mike left with a nice shiny new toy. Excited to use it we drove over to the MCG hut and after a nice cup of Tea we got our crap together for a two cave trip, Upper Flood for the pretties and so Mike could sort out his keys, then Waterwheel for some basic SRT practice rigging at the bottom. This was my first time in both caves and I have to say Upper Flood is absolutely beautiful, pristine calcite formations including straw tubes multiple metres long! The cave involved a reasonable amount of crawling due to the delicate formations on the ceiling, but there was some good photography and general bantar!

On to Waterwheel next (after finding the damn entrance in the dark with only headtorches), little did I realise (stupidly) just how WET Waterwheel is. After about ten minutes in the passageways became full of water giving about 3ft of water and 2-3ft of headspace in most of the waterways, in some places a keen 1ft of headspace which was just about small enough to feel like real good fun caving! Mike was generally whining something along the lines of "hands" and "cold" but on we went to the pre-bolted rigging point at the pitch above the streamway pool. A quick piss around rigging it and out Mike swings and starts playing, after "adjusting" the gear he quickly found himself unable to ascend and thanks to good planning the pitch was free climbable to the top to make a good escape. I had a play too and swang around for a bit before agreeing that something was wrong and after a swim around we left the cave. By this time the outside air had cheekily dropped below 0 and our nice wet oversuits were keen on freezing slightly.


Off to the Belfry after our quick MCG shower and egg sandwich to meet the Exeter lot. What a nice bunch of guys they are! Mike and I are now known as Plym 1 and Plym 2 as Exeter (being simple and unable to learn names =P) named us as we walked into the room. A very savage loss at beer pong later (less the beer, more the jager, and LOTS OF IT) we were already getting pretty drunk. The night was Sexy Santa fancy dress and as Mike and I hadn't bought costumes prior to leaving we instead bought some wrapping paper on the way up and decided to go as presents! Off we went and got changed, a short while later we return and my next recollection is of people lying down on the table in the common room, having bum or boobs painted bright yellow and then hoisted up to imprint the ceiling. Standard caving shit, so of course - we joined in - Mike going the whole hog he now has an imprint of his little man on the ceiling of the belfry!

Needless to say the next morning was rather dreadful, a hangover the size of jupiter and damn cold weather to boot! The cave in question was Manor Farm Swallet, an interesting cave sporting a nice 15m entrance pitch followed by a 6-8m steep rift (both need to be rigged) going down more horizontal to a variety of curtain, false floors and avens - very pretty! Mike had gone to lead Upper Flood so I was with some of the Exeter guys, Mike kindly let me borrow his SRT kit to play around in the entrance pitch with, while Exeter ladder & roped it down (the ladder broke the first time but its cool - they turned it upside down!). I went down last and told Exeter to go on ahead and I spent about 90 mins going up and down the pitch to gain experience and technique for future SRT caves, while doing so I adjusted the kit so that it could actually ascent and then eventually I decided to go right to the bottom to meet the others. A slightly dodgy descent of a should-be belayed rift and a bit of crawling later I bump into the rest of the party heading back to the entrannce, I passed them and carried on for a bit for a quick 20 minute nosey before heading back to meet them (there were a few of them so it took them considerable time to negotiate the narrow rift ascent and entrance pitch). After climbing the rift I went ahead to quickly SRT up the entrance in order to set up belay for the rest climbing the ladder up, this led me to solidly confirm my hatred of munter's hitch knots in static, rigid, dirty caving rope, I might as well have been tieing a wire coathanger. Not long later everyone was up to surface and we all shot back to the belfry for shower and packing, Mike had to go to london afterwards so my journey back was alone - therefore requiring multiple rest stops to prevent falling asleep as I was shattered!

On a completely irrelevant note, was working yesterday in Launceston and the lorry delivering our skip decided to lose all hydraulic function just as the skip got suspended in mid air halfways off the back, was a bit awkward......