Long Churn - 18 Feb 2006

Saturday February 18th 2006

Members present: Chris Foster,  Graeme Read,  Holly Read,  Oliver Bunting

i shall summerise the main points:

5.5 hours underground.
4 ultra cold cavers from york
1 cut rope.
4 numpties from glasgow.
-1 carabiner
-1 survival bag
40ish bearded cavers.
1 landy with blue lights
1 ambulance.

Yes, thats a cave rescue call out in longchurnn of all places. Thankfully it had nothing to do with us, glasgow had a fresher that having srt'd all the way up alum, decieded he couldn't srt or ladder out of dollytubs.

We waited behind them until firmly cold, then we just decieded rudeness was called for, and just went up our rope (on a different set of bolts, ours on streamway, theirs on the split pitch). Considered setting up a haul system, but was too cold to actually be of anyuse, as handjammers required 2 hands to remove by this point, and one chest jammer requiring 2 peoples frozen fingers to undo.

Then we had a karabiner wedge shut (wouldn't undo under tension from everyone present), and a firmly wedged fig 8. Probably fingers too cold to be of any use, but they weren't going to warm up waiting about, so the rope was cut.

Told glasgow we'd call cave rscue, as there idea had been to send a fresher to ask musc to come over if they'd finished rowten. I told them that was daft and they'd all have hypothermia. We gave them a survival bag, as they only had 1 between the 3 of them left in the cave, and left them to it.

Apparently musc had had a similar plan, because we met the first bearded chap as we exited the resurgence. By the time i'd deriged the handline on dr banisters, there was a landy by the resurgence, and a cave rescue ambulence at the bottom by the cars.

We had also had to fight our way through a really large party of screaming children at the cheesepress, causing bad tempers and confusion, as we couldn't hear each other in the cave, and lots of walking around trying to find each other and gear.

I'd like to ask for a special "ultra cockup" rating for this trip, to somehow distingish its shear uselessness from a mearly very disorganised trip.