RobE, KatieE, BrendanS
Written by Brendan
Having followed the progress down Cussey with interest, and helped carry cylinders for RobM for some of his original dives, I was keen for the opportunity for a guided tour down to the new streamway. Accompanied by both Eavi (thanks to the grandparents for babysitting), we headed off underground at about 7.
Having Rob with us was fantastic, both to show us where to go, and to give us the tour of how and when stuff had been found. From the outset this was very unlike most of the Stoney Middleton caves, in that I was not constantly stooping. We made reasonably fast progress down, and were soon at the very impressive Inglorious pitch, which I still can’t quite believe is in the same limestone as Carlswark and Layby. Shortly after we were struggling through Loper Lust, as Rob tried to persuade us it would be much easier if it was sumped. While this may technically be true, I value avoiding drowning above ease of crawling, so wasn’t too disappointed in the lack of freediving. While I have been to the bottom of the ladder before (on the way to Doom), the passage towards Vulgarious was new to me, and was very enjoyable, even though we were by now dragging the siphon pipe from Loper down to the streamway.
And then we got to Vulgarious. Having watched the videos of exploration I knew mostly what to expect, but the beginning section was less foul than I expected. However, beyond the small chamber, the flat out, half flooded section was spectacularly unpleasant, not aided by my sidelight rubbing on the ceiling and submerging almost my entire face in liquid mud. Removing my helmet helped, but while wallowing in filth I still managed to get a significant amount of mud into my eyes, which was disappointing, especially as I was wearing contact lenses. The small rift chamber provided a very small trickle of water which I used to (very slowly) wash the worst of the mud from my face and hands, before I eventually managed to get the grit out of my eyes. The thought of heading out with only one working eye was not spectacularly appealing.
A short wallow later and we were in Race Against Time – a very fine stream passage indeed. We had a quick look at Sump 2 and got the siphon started, before heading downstream to attempt the round trip via Rat Hole. After passing the slightly dodgy boulders, and sharing an SRT kit to drop the short pitch into NGA chamber we arrived at the squeeze. Rob headed through first, before I made my attempt. Although probably a similar shoulder breadth to Rob, I’m a lot taller, and the 45 degree entry to the vertical squeeze proved a bit of a challenge. After ignoring Rob’s advice as to which way to face I got chest deep before I found I couldn’t get my arms into a sensible position and had a tactical pause. The appeal of getting rescued from here was very low, so after reversing out, I made a second attempt, assisted by Katie kicking my thigh through the bottom of the squeeze, and with a breath out and arms above my head I was through. I wouldn’t want to try it after eating a bigger dinner, mind. Katie naturally dropped though no problem, making it look sickeningly easy.
We headed back to the ladder back up to Cussey via some ‘chest deep’ wading (mid-thigh for me, being tall has some benefits). Loper Lust was pretty unpleasant on the way back – a combination of being a bit tired, heading uphill, and being fully lubricated in mud didn’t help. By the time we had re-kitted to start up Inglorious, my jammers were predominantly mud, and spent a lot of time slipping back down the rope. The way out was straightforward, although I had to partially dekit for the Shattered Dreams squeeze, and negotiating the stemples in Coconut Airways was far harder than it needed to be. We hit the surface while there was still a remanent of daylight, and headed to the Saltpan to wash off, albeit with a slight aroma of sewage from the previous overspill. Post beers were most welcome – an absolutely cracking trip, and a great opportunity to see this fascinating part of the Stoney Catchment. I’m very keen to see the SMMC, although I’ll have to wait for the sump to be lowered for that, and I won’t be devastated if the route in doesn’t involved Rat Hole or Vulgarious…