Freesteel Blog » Caves, shows and tournaments

Caves, shows and tournaments

Thursday, November 15th, 2012 at 4:24 pm Written by:

Skived off on Friday 26 October to go survey the new Lost Johns’ cave entrance on Leck Fell called It’s a Cracker.

As you can see from the survey data, I was in charge of putting the little white dots on the cave walls for the laser to point at.

On Saturday Becka and I surveyed the lower parts of Boxhead (a section of Lost Johns’ which It’s a Cracker descends into) through the tube (a constricted passage with fast flowing water that backs up when you crawl into it) and down into the upper main streamway. There were some muddy side passages to inspect and draw up. Survey was by compass and clino and drawn on paper, and not laser powered.

Sunday was all day in Bull Pot Farm for me working on esoteric tilting features in TunnelX, while everyone else did some surveys of Notts Pot, which is connected to NottsII and Ireby via sumps that we cannot survey because we are not cave divers.

The following weekend Becka was not feeling very well, so I got some time off to catch up. (Now I’m behind all over again, so was it worth it?) We did cycle at an extraordinary slow speed up to the disused Toxteth reservoir (water tower not in a tower) where there was an art exhibit. The building itself was a more interesting to us and very cave like.

Dawn broke on the drive down the M6 from Southport to Birmingham on Tuesday morning.

Aidan drafted me to work at EHI Live down in Birmingham on the ScraperWiki stand for those two days, including the night of the US election. As Chomsky said: “There are two good things about [the election]. One is, the worst didn’t happen, and it might have. The second is, it’s over.”

On Saturday 10 November we rustled up a team of 8 to dig in ODB. We made 2 metres of progress through tantalizingly layered sediment that could break through any moment. According to the visitor’s book for the cave not much digging had occurred there since we were there last year.

Because I was going away to Cambridge for a couple of days, I had to precede it with some 6am leaflet deliveries in St Michael’s Ward.

Sunday was another insanely early rising, this time at 5am to get a lift to Sheffield to play at the Nautilus competition (underwater hockey) due to short staffing on our Liverpool team. This isn’t a picture of us. This is the Guildford team who didn’t belong in the bottom division, as we do, who whipped us good and proper. Matching swimming trunks is often a good indicator that the team is going to work together.

Finally, there was two hard days down in Cambridge at the ASM offices looking at the old triangulation situation in their code.

And now I’m back in Liverpool, writing emails and generally getting nothing done for hour after hour.

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