Washfold Pot - 5th Jul 2009
Sunday July 5th 2009
Members present: Adrian Turner, Chad B, Mark Sims
Report by Chad B
There is a choice of about three holes to take within the caged section containing the entrance which going down stream is Washfold Pot. It’s an easy free climb into a narrow stream way, unfortunately I was carrying the tacklesack containing our extra ropes, slings etc making life more difficult. Certainly not a tacklesack friendly cave (only Kev would be fine with this tacklesack terrain!). After many contortions of the body the calcite block is reached, a little awkward climb, leading on to an awkward crawl – heading towards the trickle of water is the easiest route. Then it’s back into the stream way and off to the first pitch. This starts out as a nearly totally foot hold free traverse, just wedge yourself in and stay high, at the pitch head is a very exposed Y-hang, one of those occasions to treat the changeover just as you do at the top of the sports hall. A very impressive 35 m pitch followed with a deviation 7 m down, a fine descent! It’s quite a draughty place at the bottom of the pitch. Thankfully now I no longer had the tacklesack as unlike the previous week the free climbs were now rigged. Which was to make getting out easier, certainly a better option that potentially relying on some dodgy twine. All of the descents down and the high traverses were really good fun, I seemed to go for swimming after dropping into pools, unlike Ade and Mark when necessary. In this section the climbs that weren’t rigged here had a good amount of footholes. The bottom section of pitches are all rigged off bolts – where I learned that at each bolt one should be checking that they are all still done up tightly by checking with your fingers, they were all fine. All of the SRT was fairly straightforward, Mark having done the cave the previous week waited while Ade and I went to the bottom. At the bottom there was a trickle of water under foot near the sump, it was certainly not in ‘thigh-deep’ water that the team had experienced the previous week. As soon as Ade was down I scarped out to let him de-rig.
On going out of the cave we were all very happy with the extra rigging we had put in to make the climbs a little less daunting – they just became normal pitches. By the time we got to the base of the first pitch I had acquired a tacklesack and had no problems with the prussic. I clipped into the traverse line with my cows tails and hand jammer went high and traversed the first section. All of a sudden I lost all energy and as they say in cycling ‘hit the wall’. The tacklesack dragged me down into the narrow section of the rift and I couldn’t get my self back to the top of this. After a few attempts Ade was hot on my heels, he told me to clip the tacklesack into the traverse line. This was like a breath of fresh air, as I was in need of some water. I traversed around with no problem and asked Mark if he would go back and retrieve the tackle sack. As he went back to this I had the best drink of water I’ve ever had. It’s certainly the most challenging traverse section that I’ve ever had to do. It was the next section of the cave that offered the worst of tacklesack terrain known, I was really glad I had my mars bar for an essential energy boost, as my arms had simply had it on the climbs. As we crawled on I came to a section thinking we must be going up now, shouted back to Mark who went on up and found that it was the way on. It was just so typical that my SRT kit decided to get wedged in on this climbs, I don’t really like cursing but it made me feel better here. I was so relieved when I saw daylight as this cave nearly killed me on the way out. Anyone who doesn’t mind tacklesacks should take a trip down Washfold. It’s certainly one of the most challenging caves that I’ve done to date and I feel really good to have that one under my belt, and of course I was very happy that we had go all our tackle out of the cave.
