County Pot to Wretched Rabbit - Easegill Trip

The non-SRT plan for Sunday was a County Pot to Wretched Rabbit through trip. This would allow us to sort out the navigation around this area of the cave and open up longer trips and through trips in the future. We met up in the Clapham carpark at 10am, the later start being a relief after the previous day. We then headed off to Bullpot Farm, where we changed and headed off for our separate trips. The plan was for a through trip, but rigged with ladders so if we failed to find our way through we could return the way we went in. A 40 minute walk over the fell took us to the entrance to County Pot where we descended and we soon found ourselves at the top of the first pitch. This was already rigged for SRT, we rigged our ladder as we would need to return if we could not find our way through. After rigging the ladder for a possible return we abseiled down and then reached the climb down into Broadway, from here we headed right into Showerbath passage and then headed downstream to eventually emerge in Spout Hall, another landmark I had remembered. From here we headed downstream with a short section of crawling in the stream to emerge in a wider taller passage with Poetic Justice cunningly hidden on the right. This provided half an hour of entertainment as one by one we fought our way up it. Once all past this obstacle we followed the bedding plane crawl to reach the top of the next pitch. This was rigged already for SRT and again we rigged our ladder just in case we failed to complete our planned route. Again we abseiled down and we found ourselves in a good sized passage. We headed downstream and quickly at a point where we recognised Wretched Rabbit coming in from the right, we now knew we could complete the through trip and felt a little happier. A short section of crawling brought us down to Eureka Junction where we decided to briefly split up. Chloe and Lucy headed to Stop Pot while Mike and Brendan returned the short distance to derig the second ladder. The derigging was completed quickly and the ladder and lifeline packed in the bag, which was dropped off at the end of Wretched Rabbit. We then headed to meet the girls just emerging from the Stop Pot choke. Time now dictated that we make our exit and so we headed up the unrelenting rifty Wretched Rabbit Passage. The tackle bag proved to be a bit of a pain, but was shared around and within no time we were at the bottom of the roped climbs. These were all climbed quickly and we emerged into brilliant sunshine a couple of hundred metres upstream of County Pot. All that remained was for Mike and Brendan to whizz down the first section of County Pot to de-rig the ladder and then head back to Bullpot Farm.

Present: Chloe Burney, Mike Bonner, Lucy Collins and Brendan Marris.