Aquamole Pot - 4th Jul 2009

Saturday July 4th 2009

Members present: Alastair Gott,  Anna Barnard,  Chad B,  Hayley Clamp,  Josh Vale

A fantastic day out! I was really glad about this after the failure of a trip the week before. Mark had been given an interesting selection of names of those wanting to go caving at training, initially I wanted to go on the Rowten trip as it’s a cave I really wanted to do. Instead I was asked if I would rig and lead a trip down Aquamole pot, I jumped at the opportunity at being able to lead my first trip, a trip that I ended up getting pretty involved in.

As all the ropes had been packed the previous night we were soon leaving the container and heading towards the Dales. Unfortunately there had been an accident closing the main road. I was in Matt’s car with no Map, so back to a garage we went to obtain one, after this we were soon heading off to Harrogate going through such villages as Little Ribston! Despite this faff we soon caught Hayley up who went an alternative route. After much faff in Bernies (as per usual) we headed off, remembering to take the road to something Longdale, rather than taking Thornton we headed towards Kirby, Doh! After many diversions, we even ended up in Masson Gill; we were heading down the right road to Kingsdale. It was getting on to 2 pm by the time we actually got into the cave!

I decided that the team order would be me, Alastair, Hayley, Josh and Anna, which would be the same on the way out. There seem to be various versions of rigging guides knocking about for this cave so I was expecting several p-hangers to be available, and mostly that proved to be the case. Annoyingly the entrance shaft and the Rabbit Graveyard pitch had in-situ ropes (for divers); I would not recommend that anyone simply follows these as a rigging guide. The entrance to Aquamole is a nicely engineered 7 m shaft lined with concrete blocks which directly lead on to Rabbit Graveyard all of which forms the first pitch. There is plenty of SRT here, plenty of re-belays and Y-hangs all the way down, they were all nicely placed, I was having great fun, I used the 94 m rope for all of this which as will be explained latter I would not recommend doing again. At the bottom of this is a fairly straight forward but surprisingly long crawl which was damp in places. The end of this crawl led to the second pitch, going down to a re-belay and deviation. I had good fun rigging quite a tight and challenging deviation for us all! Upon following the stream way the third and final pitch was reached. I looked on and saw in-situ ropes heading off directly in front of me. After spending a considerable amount of time the night before studying the rigging guides I couldn’t recall so many p-hangers going off like this. I took out the copy of the rigging guide I had in my pocket counted the number that there should be on the traverse looked down and saw the re-belay p-hanger, success! So off I went rigging this, below the re-belay came a ledge where below me was the Aven! Pretty impressive, I was really happy with the Y-hang. I knew that there were three deviations to rig on the Aven, so I started getting my slings ready, annoying the krab that was holding all my slings was totally jammed, and I just couldn’t get it undone. I passed it onto Alastair who tried and failed. It then got passed to Josh who got it un-jammed, great! I then abseiled down to the first p-hanger and managed to push myself off the wall to rig the deviation, this was simply a breathtaking experience over what must have been a 40 m pitch. At the next deviation I saw that there was an in-situ piece of cord, I decided that I would ignore this and clip a new deviation into the p-hanger. At the third deviation I was in the same situation, this time I just had to build up momentum in my pendulum swing to reach the p-hanger. I got to the bottom of the Aven and was really chuffed with myself; I was quite pleased with the rate at which I rigged. There were some diving equipment down at the bottom, I had a look at the sump and then watched Alastair abseil down. It wasn’t too long before everyone was down; one could certainly tell that there was a great atmosphere in the team. Alastair spotted some tiny cave fish which was really interesting.

So then it was off out, Anna was to de-rig with the help of Josh. I had a great time running up on my foot jammer to the first deviation, cursed my own tight deviation on the second pitch. On getting to the first pitch section I spotted that the cave was damper than before, so I though I’d better check the weather. On getting out of the cave with the time being about 5.40 pm it was raining very heavily. I went back into the cave past a few of the re-belays to await Alastair. I was getting really confused as I could hear him coming but seemed to be waiting forever. Realising that I had Hayley’s water in my small tackle sack I went further down to find that Alastair and Hayley were having a bit of a rest, Hayley was glad of the water – I told them that the weather was pretty bad. We headed off again when we could hear the de-riggers approaching. Thankfully this time the sun was out, but unfortunately so was the midges. Time was moving on and it was getting on to 8 pm, the time we and team Rowten had expected to be back at the cars by. By 8.30 Matt and Jonny could be seen walking up the hill, I think Josh had just taken over the de-rigging. After returning to the entrance shaft after going to speak to Matt, Anna was just coming out saying that the rope is in a tangle, just after Josh called for a knife to cut the rope. I then made the decision to tell Josh to come out of the cave and I would go down and sort it out and finish the de-rigging. In my mind I was not prepared to cut the rope. I had to go down a fair way down the Rabbit Graveyard before getting to the Y-hang where our rope was badly knotted around the in-situ rope above the Y-hang, which was a little bizarre. I just knew that I had to be patient to get this one sorted. I pulled the end of the rope out of the tackle sack undid the figure of eight knots at the end and went through the laborious process of pulling the end of the rope through the tangle that was in front of me. The length of the rope meant that a significant amount of rope hauling was required. It was really hard work. I would certainly suggest using two 40 m ropes for the first pitch, to make the de-rigging easier, suppose it’s very easy for the tackle sack to rap around the in-situ rope. I had a sigh of relief when I had got it untangled, and shouted up that I’d done it; this seemed to make Josh get very erotic!!! There was then a fair amount of de-rigging to be done carrying all this rope hoping that it didn’t get into another tangle. It was approaching 10 pm by the time had got out the cave for the third time. Despite all this team spirit was still high, I got a good pat on my back from the rest of team for getting this one sorted out. Unfortunately for me after diverting off to Bodrum we didn’t get back into York till 2 am, not the ideal preparation for the grade 5 Washfold trip I was doing the next day especially as I could not get to sleep!

What a day, despite the faff this has to go down as one of my most fulfilling trips, the team was great and everyone loved the Aven. Happy days.