Tunnocks - Sauerkraut
Dave Loeffler
Went down Tunnockschacht with three aims in mind: firstly, to link in John and Sandeep's survey; secondly, to derig; and thirdly, to waste enough time that my T/U would reach the magic figure of 100 hours.
All of these objectives were achieved, and more besides ... I had a look round and refound the pencil-marked points from me and Tom's survey, and we did a 60cm connecting leg. At the end of John and Deep's new stuff was a choss slope to a smallish round pitch. I bashed in a bolt (while supported by a ludicrously small natural) and descended 9m to a sloping rock floor. A short clamber down led to a chamber with too many ways on.
Left is a stooping-height phreas which slopes down to a huge pitch (2.9sec drop but also v. wide and long). Shortly before the pitch head is a crawl on the left with bat droppings, leading to another window onto the same pitch.
Back in the chamber, straight on leads past a blind pit in the floor to a section of passage with a sloping floor. There is a climbable hole in the floor (QM B) and byeond this the passage emerges part-way down a large sloping ramp pitch (QM A to descend, QM B to climb up).
At this point we were out of rope and couldn't summon the enthusiasm for ferreting the C leads, and Sandeep had a bad back so we turned round. Surveying the tight tube from Sauerkraut to the new 9m pitch was a pain in the arse. Derigging was very tedious; the higher of the two bolts in the Strudel Crawl traverse is horrendously cratered and really shouldn't have been used. 69m of Lanex 10.5mm rope is enough to fill a sack, so I had to take all the knots out of the second rope and haul it from the pitch head - fortunately it didn't jam.
Emerged to find it was hideously claggy; just about managed to follow the cairns. We *must* make up some more reflectors next year.