Swinsto Hole - 15 Jan 2006

Sunday January 15th 2006

Members present: Adrian Turner,  Dominic Galliano,  Kevin Francis,  Matt Ewles

What a trip! After spending about half an hour at the garage deciding what cave to do, we eventually left for the dales, at which point Andy decided to make several attempts on our lives with his overtaking skills :s After a hearty breakfast at Bernies, we eventually left for the cave. Parking proved to be a bit of a challenge however, with the nine seating ending up in at quite an angle. We had quite a bit of touble getting out until another group of cavers appeared out of valley and gave us a tow. But before they did, we had managed to move the back of the nine seater about a foot further down the bank :s

We eventually made it up the hill, to realise that we (the swinsto team) didn't have the rigging guide, and also that none of us had a clue where the cave was :o After faffing about trying to find the cave for ages, the other group appeared, and managed to find Simpsons, another search then resulted in us finding Swinsto. It must have been about half two, bordering on three by the time we eventually got underground.

Some interesting rope lengths resulted in some economical rigging, and by the time we got to the forth pitch, a rigging guide would have been handy, instead we just got soaked. When we got to the big pitch, I decided to sack it off as I couldn't find a deviation anywhere and the thought of prussiking 15m or so up the middle of a waterfall just didn't appeal!

On the way back up, I took serious issue with the long crawl. I had had no problem with it on the way down, but on the way up, the running water just cooled me down too much, as a result I slowed down, thus I got colder, etc... My knees also want to kill me at the moment, which I can only assume is as a result of the crawl.

On the way back down, we eventually managed to find our way to the valley without breaking anything (although twisting a couple of ankles). Dom and I went down Valley to derig (our escape route had anything gone wrong in the exchange), which just seemed to keep on going. Finally getting back on the surface again, we found that the other two had started shanking the ropes. Thankfully, we didn't have to wait very long for the other group to appear. Then it was off to Gargrave for curry, but I tried to write off the nine seater before we'd even left Kingsdale :s Trying to keep up with a lotus is hard work! Curry was good. Think we eventually got back to York somewhere around 1! Doh well, was a good day :)