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Present: Present: Flood (Wade’s) Entrance – Chris F, Stacey, Katherine, Louise, Stream Passage Entrance: Jenny, James, Jack (LUPC), George

Flood
A nice entrance, if a little tight at the top, glad that I don’t have hips! Slow to rig, but it was quite exciting as I’d never rigged and led a trip completely on my own. Everything was fine going down. Missed the deviations in Flood main pitch – thi nk that I was a bit of a pussy to swing out (never rigged anything quite that deviated!) and so we went through a reasonably large amount of water at the bottom. Nice. Got to the main tunnel into the main chamber but didn’t go very far as we had a reasona bly early call out and, since the other group hadn’t made it to the main chamber either (due to the Selected Caves’ guide about rope length being crap). Derigging from Flood was a little stressful as everything seemed to go wrong. Left my glasses at the t op of the Flood main pitch – not good when you derig a load of pitches before realising. Rope was being naughty too and got tangled as I derigged ensuring that I visited the same bit of cave more than once. Jenny wanted to do lots of caving so we bumped i nto her on the way out – she found my glasses for me! Overall not a bad trip, just a little slowly rigged!
Chris

Stream
I haven’t had an epic for ages and ages, so thought a gaping gill trip with DUSA was almost guaranteed to be epic like. Stream was good, we were all being pretty competent and we made it down the first two pitches easily. The exciting traverse and e xposed pitch head on the third pitch didn’t seem to trouble anyone too much – except me nearly when I was rigging. I found myself on the pitch head with both cowstails loaded horizontally on either side of the rift, with me kind of hanging above the pitc h… Somehow I wriggled a bit and unloaded one of the cowstails enough to move it somewhere more helpful!

Me and George ran along to the 4th pitch and I went off down it…then came back up again as the rope was too short. George looked around for other holes down to the stream and we found one with a spit at the top of it and I rigged down there as James a nd Jack arrived. Sadly the rope was still too short (though a bit less too short!). So we went back out again with Jack derigging, and walked home (via Flood). I went off down flood to see how Chris and Louise were doing, and James and George had some more SRT practice by doing the first pitch.

I got home after midnight. I am reassured that at lest that fundamental DUSA law still holds, though somewhat surprised that we didn’t get any rescue practice in Bar.

Jenny