Link Pot - 14th May 2011

Saturday May 14th 2011

Members present: Caitlin Brumby,  Mark Sims,  Toby Buxton

We popped down Link and along to Echo Aven to check out the Wormway, which wasn't half as bad as I was expecting! Super easy navigation and not all of it is crawly - it should take max 15 minutes from the bottom of the 88ft pitch to Echo Aven. I suspect it's bloody awful with more water in it though.

Having done this we zoomed back up Echo Aven and stuck our srt kits on the bottom of the link entrance rope. Then we headed off toward Pippikin and Mistral with some fairly haphazard navigation from yours truly. The link crawl is fairly long and crawly but thankfully the grim bits are fairly short. The wet wallows involves sticking your ear in the water (or your face if you like, Mark) but that can be avoided by taking off your helmet. The muddy wallows aren't really noticeable, but they are quickly followed by something which may or may not be called trowel crawl which makes up for it - liquid mud with water on top which thankfully stops just short of getting your torso wet. This is just before Dusty Junction in Pippikin.

From here we followed the route to the Hall of the Ten and then the Hall of the Mountain King, which is sinfully disgusting. Popping through a hole in the floor and then along a short bit of streamway leads you to Cigalere Streamway entering from the right, which could be fun if you don't know what's coming. Lots of interesting climbs with waterfalls in your face eventually lead to low crawls over lovely sharp ledges. Shinpads required! After this come the dreadful canals, long, deep and without decent ledges for most of the way. Scary stuff. Bring a Caitlin or other water loving weirdo to tell you when it's shallow enough to stop your desperate acrobatics in the roof. As soon as you've done this you reach the Grand Cascade and the water entering from Bye George inlet.

Link is only a couple of hundred metres upstream of Mistral so we trotted back up and I ruined my arms a bit more dragging our gear up. This was a great trip, off beat and interesting and on occasion terrifying. I ought to man up a bit with the water thing maybe!