Swildon's Hole Short Round

Friday November 9th 2012

Members present: Kevin Francis

Tony set a cracking pace which given I was in PVC and a wetsuit kept me quite warm despite the very damp conditions. The aim of the trip was to both check the water levels in readiness for CHECC and to also lower the was levels of the ducks in the section known as “The Troubles” so that they wouldn’t greatly slow the trips that would be going on over the weekend. We made it up to Tratman’s Temple without any real trouble, some of the climbs were fun given you couldn’t see the holds due to water though.

It wasn’t long before we started bailing the first duck, which took quite some time to lower sufficiently. Once down though there was plenty of air space and we all bombed through. The next duck took longer to bail and it took us a while to get into a good rhythm of scoop, pass, throw! A couple of the buckets went a little stray and we ended up quite a bit wetter than necessary. This duck was more fun, a proper no bow-waves please affair. I ended up with water in my ears and could tell Tony was shouting something at me whilst I was under and he assured me afterwards it was purely encouraging! We decided at this stage some of the buckets were knackered and so made the decision to move some further out of the cave. This made the ducks more fun.

The last duck Tony leapt straight through, deciding it was low enough. To me it still looked bloody full and after passing through the bucket I got a thorough drenching. Ben made this one look easy and we started to head out. We had a quite look at sump 2, and bombed off to find sump 1 which given how wet we already were didn’t take much encouragement to get through. We decided the students would prefer it if it looked less foamy, so we had a bit of a splash to made the place look a little less imposing. Then it was off out.

The climbs were fun with a bucket and I found myself holding it in my teeth at times. After a few cascades Tony too it on and proceeded to climb with it on his head! We reached the ladder climb and Tony freeclimbed the pitch. It was pretty impressive to see it done, though I think I prefer the ladder route! We belayed up and packed up the gear and ran out. I took the tree root route for variety.

Definitely a fun trip, perhaps better than many I have done in Yorkshire – but don’t tell anyone I said that! Having Tony with us was great because he packed the trip with anecdotes and route finding advice. Excellent day out.