Wretched Rabbit / Lancaster Hole - 18 Jan 2009

Sunday January 18th 2009

Members present: Andrew Vick,  Ben Scothern,  Catherine Moody,  Chuck Holder,  Imogen Shepherd,  Kevin Francis,  Mark Sims,  Max Spicer

There had been attempts to be organised… Chuck went round to Kev, Imo and Andy’s the night before to get some descriptions. Whiskey was then consumed and Chuck forgot to take home and photocopy said descriptions (coincidence? :p)

So after a slightly delayed start in the morning, we’d just about got out of York when Andy thought we’d better ring Chuck to make sure he’d packed both tackle sacks.. turned out he hadn’t so as he didn’t have a key, we turned around to go and retrieve the second one from the container.

We were now behind in the race for breakfast and had some catching up to do! It was all plain sailing until just before Skipton when it started to sleet… the mini didn’t like this and promptly died… It was quite a comical sight, pulled up on the side of the road in what had then turned to hail, with Andy drying bits of his engine with a sock… After a while though the car was back up and running and off we trundled… until the same started to happen again 5 minutes later! Thankfully a bit more drying, and “waterproofing” of the distributor with a plastic bag seemed to do the trick and after another of many phone calls to Chuck we arranged to meet in Skipton where he delivered a can of emergency WD40. Andy zoomed out of the garage as we were now ahead of the other car, bonus!! And as they had to make a detour to Austwick to collect Kev and Mark we made it to Bernies way before them hoorah.


Hmm spose I should get onto writing a bit about the actual caving…! :p

Me and Mark were changed first so set off to rig the entrance. I was quite comfy sat on my rock and so when the rest of them arrived I let a couple go first. We entered down Lancaster Hole, which after the initial rebelays was a fun and speedy descent to the bottom. We crawled down a muddy passage (I was cursing the holes in the club oversuit which were causing my nice new undersuit to get mucky :( ) to look at the formations while waiting for the others to come down.


[Chuck explained the way from here pretty comprehensively so I’ll skip the rest! Plus I should really be doing work rather than writing trip reports..]


I can see how wretched rabbit gets its name… we nearly got lost at one point but soon found the right way and it was great fun weaving through the narrow meanders…. I struggled a bit on one of the exit climbs but got there eventually!

The walk back to Bull Pot Farm over the moor included some leaping over bogs and jumping in puddles, yay! :) (Real age 23, mental age 3….) The reflectors at regular intervals were very handy for finding the route.

At 6hrs underground it was my longest trip so far so I found it quite tiring (the lack of exercise since the Christmas binge probably didn’t help matters!) but it was a good mix of stringyness, stompyness and prettiness. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am really looking forward to a couple more days in Easegill this weekend!