Freesteel

I’ve been on CUCC Austria Expo for 2 weeks and not been up the hill once. Have been doing survey drawing up from things in crayon from as long ago as 1990 from before we used computers bears no relation to the centreline measurements. I mean, look at the state of this:

Artistic license is required. I am pioneering the idea of printing out parts of the survey to take into the cave for correction against facts underground.

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Cap de Pount is a long walk up from the carpark up a valley and through a long cow meadow. We found the exit of the gorge and got changed, then walked up the slope and around it into another meadow after only a few hundred metres. Is that it? Becka said.

Yes, that is the lot.

You could see into part of it from above.

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Once again my camera stayed safely in several layers of dry containers for the entire trip, which is why it still works.

I’d been staring at the egress of Bitet Inferieur canyon on the road up to Portalet since first day we passed it on bikes and saw five people coming out of it grinning ear to ear.

There was no way I was going to persuade Becka I was competent enough to take us through it. She knows me too well. And we didn’t have a guidebook (the internet has de-listed it as illegal).

What we needed was someone competent to take us there.

I wonder if the Tourist Information could sort this out.

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Subject to climbing a fence and getting round a difficult landslide, you can walk to Canyon du Canceigt from our door.

Becka saw busloads of small children getting changed into wetsuits down by the river, so we decided that maybe we were up to it.

It’s a very pretty canyon with overhanging cave-like walls and flowstone and light everywhere. At one point there is a mat of ivy dangling down in free space by about 20 metres almost to the floor.

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When we first moved into this apartment 10 days ago (we have one day left *sob*), the landlord saw our bikes on the back of the car and invited us for a quick tour round the Col de Marie-Blanc, which was the first significant col to happen on our Raid Pyrenees in 2006.

We suggested probably not. For him it was a quick 2 hour work out. For us, when we did it on 17 July, it was a four and a half hour slog that would not have been entertaining to keep down with. We did it in the east-west direction, thus avoiding these very sharp sections on the way up.

It was rather rainy, which good weather for dopey salamanders on the road.

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Somehow this pair of numpties got themselves into, through, and out of two canyons today.

It was a sunny Saturday in July and Canyon du Soussoueou touts le monde was there: spaniards, french, plenty of children in guided groups.

We were probably the only persons to bother to check out the sign printed out and pinned up daily on the notice board of the hydro-electric power station. Hey, ever heard of a web-page?

Well, at least the numbers forced us to stop wibbling and try to look competent. This included pretending to know which were the toboggans and where you were supposed to jump. Nothing looks so stupid as spending 5 minutes setting up an abseil rope down a waterfall as 30 kids streaming up behind you and jumping over the ledge into the pool. Except, maybe, jumping off and breaking your legs on a rock that you couldn’t see because of the white foam.

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The Tour-de-France passed through town (Laruns) today. On advice from someone who follows these things, the best place to watch it was near the top of a big climb at the end of a straight section of road.

We selected our spot 2km short of the summit of Col d’Aubisque, which meant unfortunately we had to cycle up there in the morning. The road was already lined with camper vans and french families all set out in deckchairs at ten in the morning. What a climb. Becka calculated that it took us a factor of six times longer than the Tour-de-France riders.

I set up the our small picnic on a steep verge on the other side of an electric fence (while Becka went up to the summit and back). The quiche was a disappointment.

No one told us about the “Caravan”.

This was an endless series of corporate products on processions of floats winding their way up this desolate mountain pass like an advertising vision in augmented reality. Loud music, people in harnesses dancing, stupid giant models of the product packaging, and then several extra vehicles throwing gifts out the sides. If you were lucky the gifts were edible. But most of the time they were stupid things like keyrings, newspapers, fridge magnets, crappy hats and unexplained useless bits of plastic from the bread company.

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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.

The week of hard boat diving in the sound of Mull with the club carried off very well, though we shall not speak of the incident with the octopus.

Unusually, the dogsbody assistant on the boat was far more senior than the skipper. His name was Alan and he had run a dive charter business in the area for many years until he retired. For some reason, he chose our week to spend some time out at sea. This was fantastic as he knew all sorts of dives which the skipper didn’t know about, and was trusted. Because of him we double-dipped the Falls of Lora.

Alan had strong opinions about what places were good, and what was over-rated (eg don’t bother with the Summer Isles, they’re a waste of time, the diving’s no good there) — which was amazing because he had never once himself been underwater. Everything he knew came from dropping his paying divers in different parts of the ocean and listening to what they had to say when they came up. He gave completely accurate dive briefings.

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