Present: Olly, Jenny, Chris, Richard
Today we decided to try Aquamole Pot, we didn’t really know what ropes to take, but guessed it was a similar depth to Rowten, so took a similar amount of rope (hoping that there wouldn’t be either lots of rebelays and traverses, or else a whole series of short separate pitches…)
We found the entrance easily and Olly set of down the very well built entrance shaft of breeze blocks, this quickly led to real cave (plus the occasional scaffolding bar, and a few loose rocks). The route continued down this narrow rifted shaft via a series of rebelays (all p-hangered), quite similar to the entrance to Nettle pot in the Peak, but a bit wider. Richard scared Olly lots by dropping stones down near him. After a ledge, the shaft belled out to land in an aven/ chamber. A crawl led of from this which looked like it might be tight so Olly left his SRT kit behind whilst I waited for Chris and Richard to join me. After a while Olly shouted for me to follow (bringing the tacklesac and his SRT kit… thanks Olly!) He’d reached another pitch, sadly we had one very long rope left whereas the cave consisted of a short pitch a bit of a walk/climb to another much longer pitch. So we used the rope that was there for the last pitch (hoping that it wasn’t too old, and the people who had left it there wouldn’t mind). This last pitch was really brilliant – a really big shaft that seemed to go down for ages and ages (?40 or 45m) the echo was really cool as well. Sadly at the bottom there wasn’t much cave – the rift seemed to end after about 5m in one direction, whilst in the other were upstream and downstream sumps (actually the guidebook suggests there is a little more cave we didn’t see).
Olly and Chris set off up the pitches leaving me and Richard to derig. We decided that I would derig the bottom section and Richard the top. After sitting around for a while at the bottom I wondered what it would be like if a diver should suddenly appear out of the sump (especially if the diver owned the rope we were using…) Anyway we all made it safely out, and as a reward for derigging, it had stopped raining when me and Richard got out the cave 🙂 A cool trip, and somewhere new.
Jenny