Hensler’s Pot
Thursday, 24 August 2006
Excellent evening trip down Hensler’s Pot and out the winch. Set off down the entrance soon after Tom arrived. The only delay being spending about 15mins trying to get four AA batteries out of the ‘inside’ of my fleece after they had found a small hole in one of the pockets..
Set off down the entrance (pipe with a fixed ladder) just before 6.30pm. Several minutes of slow crawling and then the first pitch is reached. The 2nd and 3rd quickly follow, and then a short section of blasted passage leads to a t-shaped bit of passage ending at the 4th pitch. There is then a reasonable amount of crawling, sometimes in water until the passage swings to the left very, very sharply, and becomes slightly higher.
The passage becomes a narrow rift, where progress is mostly made in the roof. This is mostly easy, but there is one bit that looked a bit evil, so went in without the bag first to see if it was right (which it was), and then returned to get the bag. Think this bit is called the birth-canal, and t’is best to remove SRT kits for this.
Easier traversing then leads to a short climb down (first obvious climb-down, with a hole on the right wall where someone has started placing a spit). Narrow, blasted passage (baghdad central, I believe) then leads to easier going to the 5th pitch. More crawling leads to the top of Hensler’s High Aven, which has some nice formations at the top. This is a superb pitch of around 35m(ish).
Then down to the hensler’s master cave (a superb bit of passage), and out to the main chamber via short hensler’s, after some route finding difficulties (haven’t been in this part of GG for a while!)
Reached the chamber at around 10pm, and soon back on the surface for lots of beer!!!
Nice trip!
We then returned on Saturday 26th to do a Marilyn/hensler’s Pot exchange (possibly the first????) so that we could de-rig it. A fine 4.5hr trip! This is a quality exchange trip!