Lancaster Hole - 11 Oct 2008

Saturday October 11th 2008

Members present: Andrew Gilmartin,  Ellie Jones,  Imogen Shepherd,  Lauren Ellis,  Matt Gosling,  Thomas Blakey

A lazy day in Lancaster in lovely Easegill for a gentle potter about. After quite an efficient start to the day we drove to Bull Pot Farm, passing by lots of flooded rivers and having to negotiate a partly flooded road down to BPF. As a result we decided that Lancaster was our only option really in Easegill, especially when we saw the huge amount of water gushing down Bull Pot of the Witches and the fact we'd only brought a 60m rope with us.

We arrived at the farm to see a massive group getting ready, and we rightly assumed they were doing Lancaster. When they set off I dashed to the blackboard to confirm this, so we got changed very leisurely. Regardless, we still had to wait a while at the top as the group of 11 consisted of 6 who'd never done SRT. After a while we all descended fine (although the ropes were a bit muddled, black rope is really hard to see so it gets caught up with our lovely rope, AVOID). We potterred down Slug World (yay mud!) and Lauren took some photos and then we eventually found the Collonades. I need to get better at cave navigation, I've done Lancaster a few times this year but all the pathways were messed up in my mind (note, the water collection experiment that you used to be able to use as reference to where the climb up to the Collonades is now further in, so it's harder to spot the climb!)

We rushed out so Ellie could get home, stopping to have a quick picnic before we ascended (mmm warm squash!). Very impressively the activity centre people managed to rescue a little frog in a lucozade bottle!