Freesteel

Did the long hot drive down to the Pyrenees over two days. It was raining when we set up in the campsite.

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[Small trip to put on record with some camera phone photos. Posted two months late]

I finally finished building two wetsuits over the winter from two sheets of 2.1m x 1.2m material purchased from Elios sub in Italy described as NEOPRENE HEIWA / NEOFLEX 3mm Superelastic Red / Superstretch Black for 88Euro each, glued with Bostick 2402 from Lomo watersports.

Tried them out on a Simpson’s pull through trip followed by a Swinsto’s pull through trip. Then had an inspection of the Rowton sumps and got halfway through the third one. I could have done it with less discouragement from Becka. They are large, barely below the waterline and the water was clear.

The design is zipless (with the addition of neoprene shorts to protect them) and copied from this New Zealand seventh wave design Si wore canyoning last year. I couldn’t find where to get the Japanese Yamamoto neoprene they talk about, but the Japanese Heiwa stuff is pretty soft and stretchy like no other neoprene I have handled.

I made some neoprene socks from a sheet of 5mm and they wore through on the heels and toe balls during one seven hour trip down the Milwr tunnel by Becka which involved 5kms of walking in knee deep water each way. I’ve sewn some normal neoprene (which now feels unreasonably stiff) in those places now to see how it holds. I suspect these wetsuits will need a lot of maintenance, like anything high performance. It’s all hand sewn one stitch at a time with Nybar thread. I suppose I could measure my rate. It’s at least a metre an hour. This might sound slow, but some board meetings go on for many times longer than this.

I also save a lot of time by skipping caving trips. On Sunday Becka and Tom went down some hard place in Easgill to survey (forgot the name), while I “wasted” the sunny day in the farm programming stuff on tunnel (like they weren’t).

There was a mud crawl involved, and they were using manual instruments, which meant Tom had to put his face in it quite a bit.

Oh, and from the same roll of photos, here’s what happens when you let someone keep a beehive in your garden. Becka is just mowing the lawn.

Last Wednesday the 20th of April was a hard one to organize. Becka arranged to meet some North Wales cavers in the car park near Mold at 6:45pm to go down the second entrance of Milwr Tunnel. I was to go down Poachers Cave nearby with a friend who could give us all a lift but could only leave Liverpool at 6:45 because that’s when his girlfriend finished work.

Result: misery.

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Photo dated 21 February, Bold Street, Liverpool. My dad getting his feet cleaned by fish.

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How far behind am I with everything? Too far behind.

And caving trips keep somehow happening.

This is Saturday 29 January in Notts II on the day we got a lot of help building a wood store.

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A couple of months ago I videoed Becka and friends in Large Pot, Leck Fell, doing old fashioned tape, compass, clino surveying. Through a series of tortuous routes, this cave is connected to Ireby Fell Cavern, so there’s pressure from the Misty Mountain Mud Miners to designate this whole thing as the Large-Ireby System, because false adjectives are fun.

I’m quite pleased with this video.

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Not much product occurred in the rest of December. The Julian and Becka household experienced an episode of what was possibly swine-flu, which was going around the Northwest at the time. This was particularly frustrating for some people who wanted to go caving on some long sought after trips.

Becka slowly recovered over the course of the first week, then had a sudden relapse just before we were due to see the end of year show put on by the local pole-dancing class over in the fifth floor attic of the warehouse opposite the Cains brewery. This city keeps giving me surprises. I went on my own and brought back some sleazy-looking videos.

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The mission (on 23 October) was to dig at the far end of True Grit in Ireby Fell Cavern towards the extremely muddy dig at the far end of Northeast Inlet.

True Grit was itself a dug passage, with a section called “One Armed Bandit”, because you had to crawl through with one arm ahead of you. Too tight for SRT gear, and I further decided to leave my oversuit behind because of its bulk. If you wear just a wetsuit you can tell whether you are actually fitting through a tight squeeze or not, as opposed to imagining that the drag is only a matter of friction that only requires you to push harder.

Turned out that there was already an air gap in the passage ahead above the sea of mud, and we wallowed through with our faces to the ceiling.

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The usual cavers get together for Hidden Earth 2010 was a week ago. I managed to bad some wall space to show off what yet needs to be done on the Leck Fell surveys. The two posters on the lower left are done. They’re of Ireby Fell Cavern and part of Rift Pot, the connection about which there was a Daily Mail article.

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Deferred posting No time for a proper timeline. I was badgered into going caving again. Then I walked over to and up the Greisskogel the following day across the Plateau. Then got down to basecamp and remained there out of the way. There was one walk up, pack up the bivi (stashing all the gear into a nearby cave), heavy carry down in the dark. My podcast player went missing overnight. In the morning I saw my clean trousers hanging out on the line with my phone still in the pocket. Bummer. Could be worse. I could have lost my wallet and passport. Still, this is making it very difficult to find out where I am supposed to go to in Italy for some proper canyonning. I knew my real holiday was going to get thwarted. I’ll just have to park in some layby outside the major supermarket in Domodossola for two weeks and hope my friends find me when they go shopping there.