Hensler’s Pot
Saturday, 3 May 2008
Tom was found on Sat morning in the thief desperately trying to finish his chips and sausages in time to make it in time for a clean-up trip in dowbergill passage and so avoid abuse from a certain member of said trip.
However, faced with the prospect of taking freshers down Hensler’s pot with a possible trip to Far Waters, he was soon swayed to join our trip. Hence starts the epic….
At 12:30 ready for action assembled the teams ready for action:
Team Idiot;
-Captain Idiot – Noah, 2 wetsuits
-Assistant idiot – Tom, 1 wetsuit
-Idiot in training – Nick, no wetsuit but got lost twice and caught his willy in zip
Team Competent;
-Holly, carried tackle helped all the freshers etc
Team (Unwitting) Fresher;
-Garret
-Sage
This pot is harder than the other entrances to GG and it was soon realised that this was not a wetsuit trip in any way whatsoever. (They were worn in anticipation of far waters). After remembering feeling cold on our last trip to hallucination aven I thought it would be prudent to wear a ‘shortie’ wetsuit under my normal wetsuit hence avoiding any getting cold. This unfortunately was a big mistake. The wetsuits prevented any movement of the arms above the head ie when pushing tackle sack and I think Tom and I must have sweated out a few gallons of water each on the way in.
The pot contains a few pitches with mildly awkward but fairly easy to rig heads, and these were soon passed and the longer section of crawling/thrutching entered. This is where the trip took a turn for the epic. With breakdown in communication/competence, Nick somehow managed to get lost halfway along the long straight crawl with no side-passages, and ended up somewhat confused back at the pitch he’d just come down. After which Holly told me to ‘not bugger off and leave us’ so as to avoid route finding difficulties etc after which I buggered off (accidentally) and the other guys got lost, squeezing along an ever tightening rift to an impassible point. (Sorry Holly)
I was only informed of Holly’s little ‘side-adventure’ at the bottom of the big pitch by a very smug looking Tom. “Man are you gonna get a bitch whipping, I’m in her good books though, and I’m gonna offer her sweeties when she gets down the pitch” he said looking pleased with himself, and left me to my fate…
At this stage it was decided that Far Waters might have been a bit optimistic and everyone was happy to substitute it for a trip to main chamber, to see the shaft in daylight with the water apparently half diverted into rathole. Mud henslers’ cold water was a massive relief to both myself and Tom who hadn’t managed to wet the wetsuit since the entrance crawl a few hours previously (not including the copious amounts of sweating).
On the way out, Nick encountered his first shoddy Watty gear failure of the weekend (‘never’ I hear you cry in disbelief) where his foot loop snapped on ascending one of the pitches. (The second of the weekend was a gear loop failure in Rowten on Monday which caused a fully stuffed tackle bag to fall down the main shaft making huge amounts of noise on the way – after which Nick looked worried and said “I might buy a new harness”)
Back on the surface everyone was surprised to learn that we’d been underground for 12 hours. Tom and I had to have our wetsuits surgically removed as they had removed most of our skin and welded to the bare flesh. Then a long walk back and a very tired drive with a few sleep stops on the way.
Comments
So Tom did over sleep?
Sam Allshorn
Wednesday, 07 May 2008