Meregill Hole - 31st May 2009

Sunday May 31st 2009

Members present: Adrian Turner,  Alastair Gott,  Catherine Moody,  Mark Sims

A pretty efficient start – Ade actually turned up on time to pick me up, shock horror! I was anticipating him being late as per usual so ended up having to finish my breakfast in the car… All was going well til we parked up at the foot of Inglebrough and started to get changed. I asked what time call-out had been set for… “Call out, whats that again?” was the response…. So Ade and I hopped back into the car in search of some signal. Faff had commenced! When we got back I expected to see Alastair and Mark already changed but no, they were sunning themselves in the field instead! Eventually we all made our way (slowly due to the heat) up the track towards Meregill, which took us a little while to locate due to differing instructions on our 2 description (and Ade having a poor memory).

As the weather had been good all week we were hopeful that the Mere entrance would be dry. I did some interesting rigging off a tree branch and went down to check it out…. It was quite cool abseiling down into a big lake… But alas no, it was still sumped! So a quick mid-rope changeover and back up it was then over the wall to the Aven entrance. This was very tight and nasty! I got wedged at one point by my rack against the wall and thought I’d have to call someone in to rescue me. I was also worried I hadn’t left enough slack on my handjammer and would get strung up without being able to reach back through to loosen it. Thankfully though all was fine and I eventually managed the mere 4m or so to reach the pitch head. Lying on my back in the crawl trying to tie knots and reach up to the p-hangers without falling backwards down the hole was also quite awkward yet entertaining.

I had a quick look at the sump while waiting for the others, then when Mark arrived we went off in search of the next pitch. As the cave is liable to flooding, the traverse-line before the pitch is rather high up in the rift, causing more entertainment and some quite slow rigging on my part.

Part way down, the rigging guide claimed there was a deviation at a ledge. I climbed round the corner and found a p-hanger but couldn’t see how it would be useful as a deviation! Instead I rigged it as a rebelay… when Mark came down he pointed out the giant flake I possibly should have used instead and rerigged it (although on the way up found that this put the rope much more in the waterfall than my method had!)

Due to the several minor delays, we decided at this point that we definitely wouldn’t have time to make it to the bottom so left the tackle sack for pitches 5 and 6 behind.

Towards the canyon the way on was high in the rift. Whilst climbing up I lost my footing and slipped a couple of metres back down to the floor which shook me up a bit so I decided to let someone else take over the rigging. Mark obliged for one knot then decided he couldn’t be bothered so it was over to Ade!

At the top of the canyon, Ade got “the fear” – it was very exposed and I was quite glad I wasn’t rigging it! ‘Twas very cool though with lots of wide rebelays. At the bottom we had a quick mosey down past all the deep pool to the top of the 5th pitch where we turned round due to lack of rope!

By this point Mark was getting very “grumpy” – turns out he was actually rather ill! At the bottom of the second pitch he had a raging temperature. He said he was happy to continue derigging so I left him to have a bit more of a sit-down. At the bottom of the Aven pitch though I took over to let him get out and find some breeze and fresh air. De-rigging was just as interesting as rigging it!

Meregill is a very interesting cave; it’s a shame we didn’t manage to fully conquer it but never fear, we shall be back!!!