Sell Gill Holes Goblin Route - 24 Jan 2009

Saturday January 24th 2009

Members present: Adrian Turner,  Alexander Stelfox,  Chad B,  George Bunyan,  Mark Sims

Another epic caving trip with the YUCPC, this time down Sell Gill (Goblin) – the wet route, and it was brilliant! The team had Ade our rigger, Mark, Chad, George and Alex who did a spot of derigging. The trip was very efficient from start to finish, no faffing whatsoever. We even saved a stricken sheep from getting tied up in string on the walk to the cave!

The descent started out with a free climb (with the help of a rope) down along a stream to the entrance pitch, some relatively challenging traversing was encountered to get on to the pitch rope. Then it was a nice abseil down the rope, upon reaching the bottom while getting wet from the water fall it was necessary to clamber onto a slab which then had to be crawled through. The next pitch head was much easier to negotiate, not so for the next! It was actually a rebelay round the back of a boulder that I had to get around, but I thought it was a traverse lol! It was probably because I was standing on a ledge next to the boulder at the time. So I clipped in with my cows tails and put on my hand jammer as far in front as me as possible, took off my rack and then paused... I thought OK I’m going to have to swing out! Once I got the courage to do this, I spectacularly swung out and grabbed the next part of rope, actually the next pitch rope! I quickly moved my hand jammer onto this rope. While doing this I could hear laughter emanating from Ade and Alex at the bottom. So I ended up having to put my chest jammer on and prussic up a little to be able to load my rack again. Ade later told me that I should have come off the ledge and abseil on my rack longer which would have allowed negotiating the rebelay properly. George came down next and did the same... just way more controlled than my ‘Indiana Jones lets completely throw myself off’ moment! It was amazingly good fun though! The abseil after was accompanied by a nice view of the water fall at the other side of the pothole.

We then did some exploring along some narrow passages reaching a point where we could either go back or get very wet as it was necessary to crawl though a passage containing mostly water, after Mark decided to go through myself, George and Alex duly followed. Most of my body became submerged leading to cold water going where you don’t really want it to. Then a similar encounter was made, this time George was the keen one, Mark followed… a few minutes later he called to me and Alex that we might like to go though. So after more crawling through water we entered a nice chamber with some interesting formations as well as another pitch, which looked recently dug. We didn’t hang around for too long since we were so wet, but I’m glad we did go and see as much as we could.

The prussic out was really good fun while being challenging, I went up first, so I knew I was setting the pace! The rebelay was encountered properly on the way out lol! The really hard part was getting off the entrance pitch and onto the traverse line, I had to use all my strength to clip in on my short cows tails. Once out I was really pleased how I got through all the different challenges encountered on this trip, definitely a good trip for SRT fans.

Thanks everyone for such a good trip! :)

I was so hungry after that I ended up having a large pizza, burger and chips and another portion of chips at bodrums yum yum :o 8)