Logarcek - 7th Aug 2009

Friday August 7th 2009

Members present: Chad B,  Matt Gosling,  Matthijs Bouwman,  Max Spicer,  Thomas Blakey

One of the longest but best caving trips of the holiday. A really fun cave to rig as well, there was plenty of spits to choose from at the top, I went for three points of protection off the slab at the top. Spotted Mark’s first spit from the day before. Went down to a re-belay and then abed to the bottom, on the way down, I spotted a rusty thread with a nut on and thought ‘mmm deviation?’ At this stage I didn’t bother, at the bottom I looked up and thought ‘yep that rope is going to rub’ so back up I went and put in the deviation and all was good. After a bit of crawling we reached what we thought was the narrow chimney as described by the cave guide, Matt sent the unfortunate Tom down, only to find Max at the bottom who went through a not so narrow chimney Doh! From here we reached the so called 40 m handline as described by the book, WTF it was a pitch! The cave then forks off, we headed left and went to the far reaches of the cave which was so muddy it was unreal. On the way it was fascinating how there was something unique around every corner, be it huge formations, flowstones or massive chambers. Towards the far reaches you could feel and hear the train passing overhead. At one point there was interesting traverse that we encountered, we took a rope for this on the advice from a previous team. On the way in however, we all passed by with no problems and was wondering if that was the traverse or not. On the way back it was a different story. Because we were so muddy every person that passed through made it more and more slippery. By the time I came to it I simply could not get any grip at all, and was sliding towards the hole. Thankfully we had the rope and used it. On getting back to the fork and our ropes we headed a fair way down the right hand fork, which was well worth a visit and I suspect a less visited part of the cave.