Homecoming (359) - Rigging in
Wookey
[Main write-up above - This is Wook's writeup of his somewhat separate trip]
Long walk over from Stone Bridge with all our gear, cairning and reflectoring on the way.
Dropped gear and went to look at Garlic cave (first visit for me) and grab some gear
.James rigged in, whilst the rest of us sat in the sunshine and got changed slowly. So slowly in fact that he reappeared after about an hour for the second bag of rope that no-one had delivered. Oops - we are bad assistants.
The others headed down and I stayed at the back doing a rigging resurvey, to get good rope lengths and an accurate rigging guide, as the one we had was a bit vague. Spent a long time measuring both bolt drops and rope lengths and knot types (and then later on the surface measured how much rope various knot flavours use) in order to get accurate lengths. This is quite tricky to do solo on longer pitches, but my new SAP6 seemed to work, so that was good.
I had forgotten my main light batteries somehow so was on my Fenix backup, and after a while I realised as I had no spare battery for the Fenix and thus no light whatsoever if I had light or battery failure, and was in a cave I'd never been in before with no real idea of where to go, and I'd not seen anyone else for about 2hours, maybe I should stop faffing about and catch up with the others. This is exactly the sort of thing we tell people not to do in Austria :-)
Got a bit confused at an apparent dead-end before finding the up-pitch rope, and soon enough was dropping a big pitch where I found the others coming up, with a pressie in the form of a bagless dirty rope to extract from the cave. Spent 40mins(!) undoing a knot in one of the left ropes.
This cave seems notably devoid of floor after the first few pitches. Out after a very civilised 4hrs, with a tedious slog back to the Stone Bridge.