Freesteel Blog » Yet more Ireby surveying

Yet more Ireby surveying

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 8:28 am Written by:

Becka got a lift up to Yorkshire on Friday night with another caving buddy. Unfortunately he had to go to the Matienzo caving 50th anniversary party in the evening, which meant she was going to be short changed.

My instructions were to drive up on my own after midday and meet her near the cave entrance to take her on the second shift of the day. It’s all surveying trips. So close to getting everything finally done, yet all the little scrag ends add up to so much. We surveyed the Bolton Extensions, a normally wet flat out crawl that drains off to the left of the main streamway where all the inlets come in. But there was so little water the cave was silent. Has been like this for weeks.

Bolton Extensions drops down to a sump. High up on a shelf Becka found a small carbide pig (a sealed inner tube for storing carbide for your lights). This is the second one I have found this year. How unlikely? We took it out. No one uses carbide anymore since the advent of white bright LEDs. Becka did not allow us to ignore a scrofulous inlet on the left that was not on the survey of the Bolton Extensions we already had from, I don’t know, the Bolton Caving Club or someone. We were resurveying their map because we’d never worked out how to connect it in to the main map.

On Sunday I wanted to survey the entrance shafts and finally get everything done. But first there was a small tube going off above the connection between Northeast Inlet and Adulterer’s Crawl chamber. We didn’t finish that till 6pm. It was quite annoying because at times we were thrutching along a rift 8 metres above a floor that was clearly Northeast Inlet — which we had already surveyed. But before we found a place to climb down and connect in the survey, we diverted into a tight inlet in which there was an unknown and rarely visited chamber. Two ways off from it choked down with mud, one drafting in and one drafting out.

This is a job for the diggers in search of the elusive next vein of the cave system. No need to go on expo. Things can happen here in Yorkshire over a gentler and longer period.

Meanwhile, we have a small matter of the current findings, and an article to be edited for Descent Caving magazine. I’m trying to do the maps. Last night I stayed up late trying to get Tunnel to output SVG so that the magazine editor can import it into Illustrator and mess with the line widths. Very particular about that. (If he doesn’t get it in vector format, he traces the cave surveys again himself.) Last time SVG worked was 2005. I got some output from it at 1:30am. There’s a lot more software and browsers that can read SVG than there used to be. Not sure if it’s any more popular, though.

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