204 - 204
Mark Byers
_Mark B_ starts:
Thursday morning we left top camp at 9.05 and surface surveyed in the rain. By the afternoon everyone else turned up. I went with Mark B and Phil to 110 a day. I raced Mark B to take off our SRT kit so Phil would take it along 110 a day in a tackle bag, where he would rig the pitch QM 16A. Unfortunately I won. Mark B and I went down the crawl QM 11C, leaving the sediment-filled chamber with only one footprint. The crawl energed in a walking sized junction. Mark predicted a pitch to the left, which miraculously turned out to be one. After initial excitement and the usual stone throwing, we explored to the left going into a hole in the floor and followed small passages based around a fault line. We did some surveying to the pitch, where we saw Si and Si walk past the top of the pitch and thus it was identified as Pendulum. I decided to go out with them as Phil was planning to go on all night. Unfortunately my SRT kit was the other end of 110 a day, I had a light failure (as is now standard), and on the way back to thread I took a wrong turning down either 12C or 13C which went quite a distance looking quite like 110 a day before I realised my mistake. This led to Simon Flower waiting an hour for me (whoops). But Si Lee and Brian had food for us when we got back. Phil meanwhile finished rigging the pitch and descended....
_Phil_ takes over:
Having rigged the pitch-head off one natural, one bolt and an iffy deviation (using an MR - crab provision failure), I lobbed down, and put another deviation and a rebelay in. Meanwhile, Mark was cooling down from the 110 a day slog. At the bottom, there was a small hole, about the same size as me. Took all my gear off (including carbide, which was now dead). Spent 10 minutes going through the small bit to get to a very small chamber, with a much-too-tight rift leading off it. Eventually managed to turn round, and spent 20 minutes going 2 metres through the squeeze on the way out. It was not very nice. Spent another 10 minutes getting my breath back, and left, derigging as I went. Gave the tackle bastard to Mark, and left the cave, steaming up the pitches. Waited for about 2 hours under the stone bridge, and went back to top camp, arriving 4:40 am. Lovely. Only got lost twice.