Freesteel Blog » Digging and surfing

Digging and surfing

Tuesday, May 13th, 2014 at 7:54 am Written by:

I got tricked into going on my second caving trip of the year. Some friends visiting Snowdonia requested a caving trip nearby, and then got lazy and pulled out after Becka, one of her friends from up north, and a couple of other cavers wishing to inspect some new dig sites were already up for it. These digs are beyond the dig we had dug in ODB for 3 years before it broke through last year into a previously known cave beyond a rarely dived sump.

There were two parallel new digs, both good, with drafts detected by watching the smoke from a stinky joss stick. You could hear voices ahead of you from the other one when you had crawled to the far end of each one, so they were connected, although the draft was not circular. The dig I worked at was wide, up a 30 degree slope and full of slightly damp mud and boulders.

Excavating each boulder out and rolling it down the slope was satisfying and freed up a surprising amount of space.

That was Saturday. Sunday was windy and noisy about the house. Becka went to the science museum in Manchester. I should go to Manchester more often. I delivered some election leaflets and then went to bed, feeling that I had caught a nasty cold just in time for my holidays. Turned out it was probably a lack of sleep. The four hour kite surfing lesson that suddenly popped into the schedule on Monday turned out fine.

Hey, it’s more fun than piano lessons. We should all take lessons in a variety of things that are economically useless and we’re never going to be good at.

It was light winds, which was good for the confidence, even though the instructor said it was not great for making progress. Still, it was pretty magical to be out there in shallow murky water with the Liverpool skyline on the horizon and the wind turbines not spinning. I do feel these homemade wetsuits are a bit on the chilly side. I actually hate buying gear, so we’ll make do.

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