Aquamole Pot - 16 Dec 2006

Saturday December 16th 2006

Members present: Chris Ward,  James Gregory,  Peter Scowcroft

Quality trip... lots of string and rebelays.

Arrived at the container to realise no-one had a key, and so it was time to do a grand tour of York, waking various cavers to find a key. Luckily, second attempt proved fruitful (sorry for breaking in, Dom!) Due tothis and various other reasons, didnt get to the cave head 'til 2, at which point I realised we had no official call out. Pete assured me that Bridget knew where we were, and would start worrying if we weren't out by 10, so all was fine. Surprisingly, we found the cave head on the first attempt, none of last week's searching.

Got down the first couple of pitches and found why it's called aquamole, the 60m streamway crawl! This gave Pete a bit of trouble, and he thus decided to not do the last (60m) pitch so as to get a headstart on getting back through the crawl. Last pitch is a massive shaft, which was well fun descending. Ascending, on the other hand, wasa little more troublesome. The long prussic in the sportshall doesnt have much bounce, and it took me a while to get into the rythmn. First 20 metres took ages. Derigging again this week, and my first go at derigging deviations. There's gotta be a better way than just unclipping the sling from the p-hanger and swinging into the opposite wall (hard), but I didn't find it, despite derigging five of the buggers.

After much prussicking, reached the final pitch head only to find the last rope was stuck somewhere. Pete and James were sure I'd derigged wrong (I was pretty tired) and left a krab in somewhere which was causing the problem, but I was prettty sure the bottom fig-8 had just gotten stuck. Rerigged the top of the first pitch, and on James' instruction had my first experience of indestructible rope technique. The first pitch has about 5 rebelays to stop rubbing, but it was cold outside and speed was to be appreciated. Got to the bottom of the rope and found the fig-8 stuck in a little crevice. Vindication, it wasn't my fault!
Prussicked out (again) to find my shivering colleagues, so shanked the rope quickly and homeward bound were we.