Tunnocks - Damp Squib
Martin Green
We descended Tunnocks with a Makita drill with the aim of picking up some rope from the start of Stone Monkey. Not knowing the location og the new entrance to Stone Monkey I went around a long loop for 20 minutes to find Steve having already found the bag. We continued onto Just For a Laugh to look at pitches. The first near station justforalaugh.12 looked a little wet and appeared to have audible connection to the pitch near justforalaught2.1 which was considerably drier. I rigged this pitch with a natural thread in the floor as backup, and a y-hang across the rift. Additional passage may be reachable over the top of this pitch ot from a rift a metre of two down. At the bottom a narrow rift to a pitch went off as well as a small window to a parallel clean washed shaft, with a small stream coming in. I tried to rig out og this water with a wide y-hang and a rebelay out from the water. But this was in rain due to an aven further alonf the shaft making it drippy. I descended going down several ledges, that the original stream goes down. At the bottom a rift went off, which quickly becomes too tight, along with some small phreatic passage which also closed down. I retreated now slightly damp to survey out with Steve derigging, taking all the gear back to the bivy (all new bolts were greased).