Stream Passage Pot - Flood Entrance and Bar Pot

Saturday May 25th 2019

Members present: Alistair Rollinson,  Jean-luc Heath,  Joe Twigg,  Miles Armstrong

After meeting Lumens for a classic inglesport breakfast, a nice easy approach was had from Clapham as always. Although, it's worth mentioning that parking on the Saturday of a bank holiday winch meet is an absolute nightmare. Regardless, a spot was found and a pleasant change occurred. 0/7 on the dankness scale. Joe rapidly discovered that being tacklemaster doesn't mean that literally any gear in the store will simply bow down to his mastery and scale perfectly to his size. The culprit: a size "medium" oversuit. Finding that said suit restricted his gate to under 3.5cm, it was decided he would attempt to scrounge an oversuit from one of the swarm of BPC'ers camped up at Gaping Gill. Following the toll-free route soon landed us at Ingleborough cave, and a convenient opportunity to acquire ice cream. Some steps and munches later and we were at the oddly charming encampment of the BPC, and headed down to the winch tent to put in a callout. Here we found Cat, Andy, and a rather full callout board, nevertheless we wrote our trip on, and chuckled as we sent Joe off to beg Andy to obtain him an oversuit. Cat soon came to the rescue with an excellently purple oversuit that came in at a good size for our underdressed tacklemaster.

The Stream Passage Pot itself was a straightforward and enjoyable trip as ever, especially considering it was pre-rigged. However, there was significant winch meet traffic causing a relatively slow descent of the pot, and some very awkward manoeuvres to allow people past in the traverses. With Miles continuing to lead the way we were soon in the impressively lit main chamber. We spent a good amount of time here admiring the view and chatting to the washed masses, who for some reason assumed we'd have at least a vague idea of what's going on. Wrong.

We soon headed out towards Flood entrance, with the navigation from the main chamber proving easy as ever. Upon reaching the bottom of South-East pot, we found a not insignificant queue, leading us to split in half, with Lumens and Miles heading up Flood entrance, and myself and Joe heading out of Bar Pot. For both teams a fairly straightforward exit was made, with myself and Joe walking over to Flood entrance just as lumens popped out to the now quite rainy surface.

A quick wander over to cancel callout and return the borrowed oversuit soon turned into a full-blown chat with a variety of BPC members with whom we have one kind of association or another. Eventually bidding the BPC farewell we trundled down to Clapham through the now quite persistent drizzle, which increased the dankness factor of the change by a minor 1 point, as it was still fairly warm. Lumens was soon returned to his nest at the NPC, where we found a scene of exploded eggs. Odd.

Overall, a very enjoyable trip with good performance from all involved, despite the usual winch meet faff.