Lancaster Hole - 23rd Jan 2010

Saturday January 23rd 2010

Members present: Josh Vale,  Matthew Chubb,  Sam Briscoe

Well what can i say about this trip...... I know a total cock up :P. I think the day was cursed from the beginning, with Alastair being too ill to go on the trip, although spirits were high as Matt was going to document the trip.
The walk to the entrance was fine and it was nice to find it already rigged, so we started to decend Josh first, then me and Matt at the back. All was good until my rack stopped half way down, i turn to see what the problem is and the rack decided my hair was edible, bad times :(. After some attempts to free myself and alot of profanities, i got tangled up more, leading into a rescue situation.

The next few minutes were spent debating on who should rescue me and after josh started ascending and made it worse it was Matt to the rescue. A few moments later after some frantic reverse prussiking, and some brutal hauling, enough weight was off the rack and i removed the hair :D and downwards i went to the bottom of lancaster. Thankfully the next section of the cave was problem free, a quick visit to slug world, then on with the rest of the cave.

As a few groups had gone down Lancaster on Saturday we were missing a description and decided to explore, ( completly missing the Colonnades :( ) after some time and some failed slides, we reached fall pot and decided that we should go down. After a quick break we turned round and headed back and found the crap trap (unbeknownst to us) and headed down past stupid and pointless deviations, once in the main drain we headed upstream, until cock up number 3. We decided to climb over a boulder rather than go through what we though was a deep puddle, at which point Matt slipped and sliced his finger and hurt his leg and to add insult to injury the puddle was like 2 foot deep :P. At this point we decided not to chance fate and headed back home.

The rest of the trip was smooth sailing and once we were all on the surface we headed back, we even stopped off to look at a ruinned structure and make mud angels. Overall abit of a disaster, but hey everyone has bad days. The moral of the story was always carry first aid and rescue equipment :P