Peak Cavern - 15 Mar 2009

Sunday March 15th 2009

Members present: Ben Scothern,  Chad B,  Chuck Holder,  George Bunyan,  Jonathan Booth,  Kevin Francis,  Thomas Blakey

"Set an alarm for about 7.30am so we can get up for about 8am" Most people would read this statement to mean getting out of bed for 8am, with a thirty minute lucid lie in. Chuck isn't most people and at 7.30am he was at the end of my bed badgering me to get up. In protest I slept in until 8.30. I assume Chuck realised the error because he brought me tea. When I did get up I found the others had demolished their breakfasts and were twiddling their thumbs. There wasn't a lot we could actually do until the Peak key holder arrived so we waited... and waited... I ate and we filled in the indemnity forms and we waited... we gave up waiting and got someone else to take us to the cave! Thanks to John S! We were still in for 10am, so all was well.

The aim of the trip was to do a similar route to that we did two years ago, Lake Sump and Moss Chamber with a few detours on the way. Personally I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, spotting some junctions I have used in the past. We started off well, racing through the show cave and down the metal chute. We walked slowly along the old show cave route, down through the wet bits along to the Upper Gallery. We pointed out Pickering's Passage which we hoped would lead us to Moss Chamber / Toadstool Aven later on. We then passed Treasury passage and stopped at Surprise View sump, which George went down to look at. We passed the Main Stream Inlet and went down the shiny new Surprise View ladder. We turned right and headed to Squaws Junction. We climbed up and took the second right passing the cool concreted bedding and on to Wigwam Aven. Several climbs were made and the water butt emptied on those below. We didn't really want to do the climb (eventually it would only have taken us back to Main stream Inlet anyway) so we double backed and climbed back down to Squaws.

We marched downstream stopping at a rope that led off to Window Inlet. Most of the team went up this and disappeared in various directions (one of which would have led back to the passage near Wigwam) We regrouped and continued up the Peak main streamway. We passed a rusty ladder, an inlet on the left (Lake Passage) and a large chamber on the left (Picnic Dig). We continued until we reached a sump - Far Sump. It was much smaller than I imagined it to be. Here we made boobs in the sand and attached a penis to Johns helmet. Oh the joys of all male trips!

We turned round and went back to Lake Passage. We turned left at the junction in search on Lake Sump, which we found. John and George had tentative looks, but I didn't want them to go in! Instead we took the dry bypass round. We thought we had been thwarted when we reached the end, but instead had hit Quink Sump. We quickly bypassed this too but the dry bypass turned into a damp wade with Chuck making a variety of humorous noises at the water level crept up! Then we found Jim Lister had beaten us to the sump! He must have overtaken us whilst we were at Far Sump. We had a look at the water and the large amount of items that had been brought to the dive base and then most of the team scaled The Ramp. This took quite a while and we decided not to head via Moss on the way out - we knew we had to be out by 5 and didn't want to push our luck. Instead we walked downstream of Surprise View down some immense passage to meet the sump - Buxton Water Sump. George and John refreshed themselves (not realising that the sump water led through to where we wash our suits...) and then we headed back, stopping partway through to investigate an inlet that was too small but provided an excellent water slide. Sometime later we found ourselves back at the Surprise View ladder.

We stopped on the way out twice, once at Surprise View sump so that Ben could have a look. The temptation to pour welly water on him on his climb out was too great and Chuck duly emptied his down the rift! We scoffed our rations (which John had been carrying around all day) and headed to the other end of the Buxton Water Sump where we washed our suits. George managed to make his club suit (which had been completely muddied) look almost new! We got out for about 3.30pm passing a tourist trip on the way out. It is entirely possible that we were all out of the cave earlier on Sunday than we had all been in the cave the day before!!!

We headed back to the Chapel to get changed and then went for pie and chips. On the way back from the chippy we met up with Jim Lister who had just finished his dive and was happy to chat to inquiring minds about it and his Ink Sump project.

In all another cracking and efficient trip, despite being 7 of us, on which we did a good amount of exploration and route finding - anyone that goes again should have a good idea of the major junctions needed to explore further into the system (8th biggest in the UK?)