Present: Maria Buckles, Christopher Pearce, Rosie Hendriksen, Lydia Miller, Alastair McIntyre
Duration: 4 hours 30 minutes
1st trip of Chrimmermeet ’23! After a lovely drive down to the NPC to realize the wrong weekend had been booked, Chrimmermeet 2023 started off a chain of bad events. However, once sorting accomodation at the Bullpot Farm, we had somewhere to sleep and rest up for the saturday of the trip – although not much sleeping was had and Ian ate half of my cake… Anyway, Chris and I had packed the tackle and gear we needed to run out trip down Death’s Head Hole, deciding to take Alastair, Lydia and Rosie for their 2nd SRT trip (well Rosie’s 3rd if you want to count the 11hr trip down county). Everyone was in good spirits despite having to wake up early and cook breakfast so Chris and I would have time to complete a 2nd trip in the same day with Maya and Chris C. We got to the layby roughly at 10am after a stressful drive in the Dale roads – you’ll see why I was stressed in the next report… Chris got ready quickly and started off towards the cave in order to get started on rigging the many rebelays since it would obviously take some time and we didn’t want the freshers to be standing outside in the minus temperatures and wind, freezing. We had a little trouble with Alastair’s harness and Rosie’s chest strap but once it was sorted we headed off to the entrance where Chris had already rigged the first 3 rebelays and I couldn’t see his head. I sent Alastair down first since he wanted to get out of the wind, with a bit of faffing originally getting his descender on the rope – he rigged it upside down – but he went through the 1st rebelay with no problems. Once he was on the next bit of rope, Lydia was next to go, rigged her descender like a pro and started her way down. Once Alastair had gotten off the 2nd bit of rope and Lydia was on it, Rosie went, once again rigging her descender like a pro, and got to the 1st rebelay when Alastiar shouted that he was stuck. Now, there wasn’t really anything I could do seeing as I was way above at the top of the pitch so Chris had to help from the bottom. What had basically happened was that he had used his hand jammer to get his cowstails off at the rebelay but left it too high, thus putting weight onto it. I’m not really sure what transpired down the pitch since I was sat above ground freezing. During the 20 minutes it took for Alastair and Chris to sort him out, I decided to facetime my mum wrapped in the storm shelter since there wasn’t really anything I could do. I kept checking in on Rosie and Lydia, making sure they were warm and still happy to be there – shocker, they absolutely were because they are some of the most enthusiastic freshers thus far. Once Alastair was unstuck, and everyone started moving down, it was my turn so I quickly said goodbye to my mum and headed down as quickly as possible to get myself warm. Once I reached the bottom I was nice and toasty and sat down – unfortunately on the mandible of a sheep STILL WITH ITS TEETH, and you bet that was sharp on the bum. Anyway, Lydia and Rosie were waiting at the bottom of the next pitch and so I called them back up since we basically finished the cave at that point and and needed to turn around so Chris and I could make the 2nd trip and still make it back in time for the Christmas dinner Dionne was cooking. So off we headed up with Chris and Alastair already getting a head start. I brought up the rear, de-rigging since it’s my favourite thing to do now and then remembered why I shouldn’t have done it when I had 2 heavy tackle sacks of rope either side of my harness. Let me say, I forgot how much effort it is to ascend with that much extra weight attached. I had to stop a few times to gather my strength BUT I did learn from my trip up the goblin route in Sell Gill to clip the bag onto the uprope of the rebelay when trying to get off the down rope – I DO NOT NEED THE EXTRA WEIGHT WITH THESE TINY BICEPS – Chris asked a couple of times if I was alright since I was grunting pretty much every time I moved upwards towards the end, and when I got to the final rebelay came to relieve me of the weight since he could walk down to it (obviously attached to the rope for safety). We quickly walked back to the car and changed in order to get back to the farm for the 2nd trip.
Maria Buckles