Dudley Caving Club: Dan-yr-Ogof & Sucking the fun out of caving

Saturday 29 November 2014

Dan-yr-Ogof & Sucking the fun out of caving

I had been lacking enthusiasm for organising a trip for the weekend so Jess and Chloe decided on a couple of trips.

The first was to be DYO....... Jess wanted to do the tighter bit of the longer crawl as she had previously done the whole route, bar about 5m of tight squalid crawling. Chloe's only prerequisite was that she wanted a couple of challenging trips as she hadn't found anything tiring of late......Chloe has previously asked for trips that scare her and trips that she would find 'memorable' in the past and this weekend we were again able to fulfil her criteria :)

Entering through the show cave we were in for a pleasant surprise with reindeer, penguins and father Christmas lining the route in!
Sploshing through the lakes I noticed a passage off which I had previously not explored. Fairly sure it would be the way in to the Syphon Series I called the other two to follow and we did indeed find a couple of pieces of pipe in a clear pool. After a couple of minutes priming the pipe we headed off for our round trip whilst the syphon did its work.
On our way through we took a quick detour to Wigmore Hall and up the old dig at the end before continuing on through to the climb up to the longer crawl. The crawl itself was somewhat more strenuous than I remembered as this time I had my camera box catching and jamming every couple of feet, but we were soon through the worst and continuing with our round trip. Chloe led the way with only a couple of pointers for route finding.
On our way out we decided to take a look at the syphon and found that there was a good foot and a half of air space and the syphon still going strong. We were well within our call out time so decided to go and have an explore. I led the way and was soon lying in gloomy mud with a foot of water covering it as I negotiated the duck through to the muddy section of the series. We headed down the passage way first slipping and sliding our way through copious amounts of sludge until we reached a sump. About facing we headed the other way until we reached a blocked constriction. This was at the foot of a very muddy and slippery slope and both Jess and Chloe were in fits of giggles as they tried to turn around in the very small chamber at the end and slid all over the place. On our way back through the duck we headed up a more inviting looking passage which soon turned in to a sharp and awkward rift. Again this was followed to its conclusion taking pieces of my suit with it (back at the hut I would check the survey and find this passage aptly named 'Razor Passage')
Back in the lakes we washed off the sludge and mud......Jess was sure we'd actually found the sewage series rather than the syphon series.......before returning to warm up with a luxuriously warm shower.