Saturday 24th February 2024

John Cooper, Pete Hann, David Morrison (Tuska) and Jude Vanderplank. Carried across two new bags of sand. One full mix of cement done and used by Pete (60%) at the bottom building supporting walls whilst John used up the rest higher up. Meanwhile Tuska was building walls on the surface. A second full mix was then done before Tuska left. Pete used all of it at the bottom. His wall now reaches and supports the roof boulder. One large boulder cemented into the floor as it was too big to fit on a wall. As we were finishing Jude appeared to inspect the work. 3 hours. John.

Bottom, inwards and downwards. Photo JV.

Wednesday 21st February 2024

John Cooper. Early evening trip to carry on with p&f on the large rock. Now in smaller chunks. Whether they are now small enough for Pete to build with will find out another day. Nice trickle of water flowing along and down into the floor. 1½ hours. John.

Pete Hillier and Trevor Hughes arrived on site at 19.00. Once at the dig face it was obvious that someone (John) had kindly destroyed the rock that I was going for tonight.
To give us room to work we hauled about 8 skip loads of ugly rocks to the surface enabling us to move the wall building rocks, so recently produced, away from the dig face. I attacked the next boulder forward and reduced it to a single residual piece. Quite a few smaller rocks were pulled out of the end leaving an enticing open space ahead from which emitted the usual draught.
We stopped work at 21.30 as the clarion call of the Hunters was beckoning.
The next trip (Sunday?) may, given some careful rock breaking, allow access to the c2m open passage ahead.
Good luck to the Sunday team. Trevor.