Saturday 29 March 2014

Return to Nettle pot

Due to the fact that we failed to find Derbyshire Hall on our last trip to Nettle, we decided we would need to return fairly soon while the route was still fresh in our memory.
I had travelled up to the Peaks wearing most of my kit, so on arrival all I had to do was jump out grab the rope and my SRT kit and head off to to start rigging the entrance shaft so as to help speed up getting people down the entrance shaft, so that was that and i was soon at the bottom of the shaft closely followed by the rest of the team, we soon made our way crawling through the sticky mud to the second pitch down, where Mark took over the rigging, then came the rope climbs up and by now it was getting difficult to tell what was SRT kit and what was clay, another short crawl over the far flats followed, and then finally the last pitch down was found - success - Mark went first followed by Major Andy then me, on my arrival at the bottom of the pitch I was called to the front to try Freeze Squeeze as Mark couldn't fit, I tried helmet off and head first, I tried on my back and feet first but it was a no go, I then asked Steve to have a go but he had the same result, I tried again feet first, breath out wiggle a bit breath, I was moving slowly but surely, but then disaster I had a large piece of the roof right in the gonads and my chest was stuck, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't go any further into the crawl, bugger, getting my self out of the crawl wasn't very easy either, so that was that-failed, oh well, we all slowly but steadily made our way back across the mud to the pitches out, and by now we were all a nice shade of brown from head to toe, finally, once we where all on the surface more than a few of us agreed,we wont coming back to nettle again, bl**dy shi*t hole, well not while its still fresh in our memories anyway.

Present: Andy G, Andy K, Mark B, Jess B and Steve W


                                          Nice and clean at the bottom of the entrance shaft

                                                        climbing up from freeze squeeze

Andy climbing up the entrance shaft

No comments:

Post a Comment