13th November
A couple of hours underground in Mouldridge Mine, rescue training. Casualty for the day took his job very seriously, including classic lines such as "I'm really sorry, but I think I've wet myself!"
20th November
Kathryn and I headed down Streaks Pot to try and do the through trip. Things got off to an inauspicious start when we parked in the wrong place. We then drove off again with the guide book and description on the roof. Only the guidebook was there when we stopped, so we ended up doing the trip with no description. This meant that we managed to see pretty much every single bit of passage in the cave, some bits 3 or 4 times, as we tried to work out where the way on was!
After descending the pitch just inside the top entrance, we climbed down a couple of rifty sections and spent an hour and a half in the upstream series, convinced that there must be a way on and that we'd done the whole cave. When we'd finally given up and all but decided to head out the way we came in, we found the actual route on to the downstream series, under a shelf which we'd missed earlier. From here, a mixture of squeezy bouldery bits, small stream passage and sandy crawls soon had us back on the surface after a slightly more epic trip than we had anticipated. We then ambled over to the top entrance to recover our rope. Both entrances are full of unfriendly-looking spiders.
Driving back, we even managed to spot our description lying by the side of the road and confirmed that there wasn't much of Streaks Pot that we haven't seen!
TU 2.5 hours
