Present: James et George
The original plan for the day was to go down Tatham Wife Hole with Martin, unfortunately Martin was feeling very tired, which combined with the almost uniquely sunny weather conditions meant that he decided to Jack. me and James both felt up for something a bit more challenging un/fortunately we didn’t have any hangers so Balck Shiver was out of the question, aquick flick through the rigging guide later and we had decided upon Nick Pot, using Thornbers’ Entrance, which had been p-hangered, and also sounded the least deadly option, neither of us particularly fancied the 110m Vulcan Pot rigged off spits!
We walked up to the entrance in the blazing sunshine, and then proceded to walk past the entrance and then we walked a bit further, I was a bit unsure that we were in the right place, because using the power of geology I could tell that we were walking across shale, which had streams running down it (which magically disappeared about a kilometre before hand). James thought the cave was further on near the Summit of Ingleborough, I decided I couln’t be harrised to walk that far and so decided the cave was definitely back down the hill. It should also be added that james was a complete pussy on the way up and had to stop for several rests, between bitching about the tacklesack. (Hard caver my harris).
Eventually we found the entrance where I was a pussy and decided to rig the first pitch, and get James to rig the ‘traverse in the gods’ and the big pitch, which was nowhere near as scary as we were expecting (showing our potential as hard cavers). The entrance crawl was pretty small, dismal and uninspiring, but the pitch head appeared pretty quickly, the pitch was OK apart from a couple of very dodgy looking deviations (dangerous cavers need not apply!) from naturals. we then crawled down to the big pitch. The traverse in the gods is basically really tight crawl about 5 feet deep and 1 foot high around the outide of an absolutely massive shaft. It would be quite interesting were it not for the really crappy ‘Craftman’s Style’ mud which it’s filled with. There was a fixed rope in place, and it would have been much easier to use this due to the fact that you’d have to try fairly hard to fall off and unscrewing maillons was a complete derwentw*ter due to the mud.
We fannied around a bit o the pitch head making sure everything was rigged perfectly before james launched off into the abyss, the first re-belay caused a bit of bother, as did finding the second but it didn’t take long before we were both at the bottom. the pitch was really cool, with James looking a very long way down when I was swinging aorund at the first re-belay, looking up you could see a big hole in the roof where Vulcan Pot enters- one for another day I think! We were a bit short of time due to our earlier deviation onto Ingleborough so James set off almost as soon as I reached the bottom. Unfortunately when we pulled the rope up at the top off the pitch it snagged on something meaning I had to re-decend the pitch to free it, ultimately resulting in us missing our call out (walking to the wrong farm on the way back didn’t help either)
Martin had driven to Ingleton to call out cave rescue where they told him to go to the nearest pub to wait for news, in the mean time we had used the phone at the farm to tell cave rescue that it was false alarm. We then sat outside the farm for an hour or so watching a little owl watching us. there was a really short dog as well with little stumpy legs which gave it a funny walk, such things amuse you when you’re bored. We walked down to the road to see if Martin turned up, but we weren’t expcting him til the next morning so we opened up the survival bags for a bit of novelty value. we also didn’t have any water for our carbides, but luckily James had the fantastic idea of filling them with his w*lly juice- because he said piss wouldn’t smell very nice, so we had light and shelter- Luxury! Luckily Martin turned up though so we didn’t have to spend the night sleeping next to the road- an epic trip!
George