Freya Bearn, Billy Evans, Ed Ford and Mike Waterworth.
There was a knock on the window around 3pm, two cavers were looking to borrow a dry bag so they can take a phone on their planned Short Round Trip as they suspected they'd need route guidance. I lent them a hard case and they went off on their trip. 30 minutes later I got a call "Billy has forgotten his undersuit, can we come digging with you instead?". And so the two person team had become a 4 person team, with Billy and Freya joining the digging trip.
Ed and I had been digging through the floor on Sunday with hand tools, a 2.5lb hammer and chisel being used to break through the thick calcite floor in Mad Hatter Hall to find the route the water coming into the chamber flows on to. This time we took in 2 hammer drills with chisel bits plus we ferried in a Daren Drum of sand. We all made it to the chamber with only a couple of small route issues from the two newbies (Freya was surprised to see me coming towards her as she'd done a loop and had somehow started climbing back towards the entrance!).
We quickly started breaking through the calcite with chisel bits, thinking we'd find a mud floor underneath it. Nearly 2ft later, we're still finding calcite! This floor, which covers the entire chamber, is ridiculously thick and has bested us and our tooling. So after 2.5 hours of digging and increasingly stale air we switched over to the TPC dig.
This proved to be a lot more fruitful as we dug down through the boulder pile, enlarging the ruckle hole down into the vadose trench. The walls were proving to be unstable and so we dug back until they were standing safely. The digging is easy, with a bucket and passing of rocks working well at the current depth. None of this has been calcited in so it's easy digging at present.
We added a single bolt hole above so it'd be possible to add a hauling rope in the future. The dig itself will shortly need shoring and more engineering to make safe and then backfilling the void to keep the shaft proportions.
Crawling back out with the drills and full kit made me appreciate leaving more tools in-situ for next time.
5 hours 8 minutes. Same again next week! Mike.
