Homecoming - Bolting the Brandywine
Adam
We left Garlic camp at around 9-10am-ish. Time can blur on these expeditions. I messaged Signal to give our plans for the day. These were to check Homecoming for any drill bits. If we couldn’t find any, we would prospect. If we could, we would go down Homecoming to bolt and rig the rift we’d taken a small look at the day before. After putting these plans into the signal chat, I received a very welcome message from Harry saying that he had drill bits outside of Homecoming that we could use. After the short walk to the cave entrance from Garlic, Fiona and I gathered our supplies and I set a callout at Basecamp for 10pm with Colin. Upon packing the rope into my tackle sack, Fiona made some concerns regarding how long it was and how much we'd be able to properly explore with it. I too was a bit worried, but given what we had available, it was the best option for the time. We entered the cave at approximately 11:30, going down the Welsh Engineering route, as Colin and Aidan had shown us.
On going down the Eye of Sauron, I told Fiona to wait and shine her headtorch down the great pitch after a minute of descent, at which point I leaned over the hole, attached to the traverse line of course, and took a picture with my own light off. All the while very worried I'd drop my phone. Fortunately this did not happen and we got a really good picture out of it, though I'm disappointed at the actual camera quality, but what can you do?
We arrived at Urinal Rock at around 1:30pm and we looked into the rift that we had seen the day before. I remembered on the journey down that the rebelay onto the rock had some coiled up rope at the end and so instead of starting our rigging at the rock, we simply extended the pitch down to the rift. We used the hammer on various sections of rock on our way down, but neither of us liked the sound of them. Eventually, I got to a small platform in the rift. I walked to the edge of the platform and tried the hammer on two opposing rock walls. Success! The rock sounded good! I got to work drilling the bolts and setting up a Y-hang. I made some small mistakes during this, such as not flattening the rock properly for the anchor and bolting at a slight angle. Simple and really annoying stuff. It ate much of our time as I used the sharper end of the hammer to correct my mistakes. After I rigged these, I descended from them to a further platform down below, wanting to be the very first to know if my Y-hang was insufficient. Fiona then followed me down and took the bolting gear to set up the traverse along the rift. At the first traverse bolt, the rope had ran out and we set to work using the short rope we'd brought down with us. As Fiona bolted, I ascended to Urinal Rock to grab some more gear. As I did so, I noticed a glaring problem: the rope rubbed. The thought of someone being on this rope I'd rigged and it snapping would haunt my dreams, so I knew a deviation was needed. We didn't have the gear for a deviation at this time, but I still tried to find a suitable natural. There was a sizeable flake that I liked the look of, but I wasn't sure. I tried climbing up to it to get a closer look and pulled on it.
The damned thing came off in my hands. About twice the size of my head, heavy and sharp. I sat back in the rift for a few seconds just in disbelief and then told Fiona to stand well back and that I was going to drop the flake. After she stood well out of harms way, I dropped it down the rift and it smashed into pieces into the streamway. We'd have to find something else for the deviation.
Fiona then continued bolting, eventually bolting three sections of the traverse. She used her jammer to look round a bend, finding a big chamber! I can't recall how large it was, but it certainly a surprise to me. My past experience with bolting traverses in expo has led to... well more rift. The fact that this one actually led somewhere was exciting. Unfortunately, the rope we had was not enough to set up another section of traverse and then descend into said chamber. The last bolt was already pushing our time and I did not want to be out after call out, so we resolved to come back and properly survey our findings at a later date. The day prior, however, I'd promised the SAP to Todd, so it would have to wait at least a few days.
For the name of the section, we came upon Brandywine Overpass.
As we prepared for our journey out of the cave, I noticed that I had left my pantin in my bag at the top. I was annoyed, but only a little. I'd survived the last expo without a pantin at all, it'd be fine.
The out journey without a pantin was no problem, but I did make some dumb mistakes, largely involving not looking where I was going. Twice I hit my shoulders on sharp rocks whilst prussiking and not looking, one time I prussiked up and hit my head very hard onto a flat ceiling. Annoyed at myself, I stopped to make sure I hadn't bitten my own tongue or cheeks in the process.
My ascent of Eye of Sauron before Fiona had given me a bit of headway, so I took a small break at the top of one of the later pitches to sing some Cavetown. None of his songs involve actual caves as far as I'm aware. After a few of these, Fiona caught up with me and we exited the cave at 6:45pm, 2 hours after we'd started to leave.
A good trip, we'd made progress though not nearly as much as I wanted to make, my main goals for the next trip were to survey it and to rig a deviation. Due to me giving the SAP away for the next day, the former would prove difficult.