Quaking Pot - 23rd Sep 2010

Thursday September 23rd 2010

Members present: Caitlin Brumby,  Catherine Moody,  Mark Sims,  Toby Buxton

Well... we didn't get very far but it was fun nevertheless.

I hadn't been too keen on the cave after reading all the descriptions of tight nastiness, but Toby bullied me into it, insisting that I would be able to fit through the crux fine. As it happened, we never found out if that was true or not...

We had a little bit of faff finding the right shakehole, and when we did, we opted for the dry entrance, seeing as how there was a pretty hefty waterfall going down onto the wet entrance...

The first pitch has a constricted take off (not surprising for Quaking) but wasn’t too bad at all. The bottom of the pitch leads to a squeezy rifty bit which was fine on the way in (apart from the tackle sack getting stuck) but a lot harder on the way up. You also have to avoid falling down the hole which is the joining of the wet entrance (though I didn’t actually notice this hole til I’d already gone past it :s)

The second pitch was also rather narrow at the top, but soon opened out to a rather wet waterfall, the wetness of which was reduced by a deviation a couple of metres down.

From here, things got a bit more interesting. The way on was supposed to be “a step up into an abandoned rift”. Hmmm. Well we found the step up (and the constricted squeeze that the water flows into) but there was a bit of an issue. There was water gushing out of just about every crack in the wall; the “abandoned rift” was now a channel for this water, and going through the rift involved getting rather wet from the waterfalls that we can only assume were really not supposed to be there. We went a little way along until getting to an S-bend which I got half way through before getting stuck. I’d definitely like to purchase an omni before attempting a return trip. Mark and Toby had carried on to the next pitch, which whereas the description described the water being a “light shower”, they described it as more of a “power shower”.

Deciding that the water levels were just a bit too stupidly high, we abandoned ship and returned to the sunshine. We will be back again when it hasn’t been pissing it down for weeks and the ground isn’t completely saturated!