Dudley Caving Club: Walking On Air In Ogof Ffynnon Ddu III

Sunday, 13 September 2015

Walking On Air In Ogof Ffynnon Ddu III

Having had a gentle warm up in the Mendips with Mel on the Saturday, Sundays trip would be a little more challenging.

Mark Burgess arrived at mine at 7am and together we headed for the SWCC and our objective Smith's Armoury at the end of OFD III.

We changed swiftly and lost no time heading up the hill to the OFD II, top entrance.

We kept up a good pace through the entrance series, snowman passage and across poached egg climb. Having both worked up a sweat we were glad of a short respite whilst rigging the pitch down the Crevasse before continuing on over the Shambles to the infamous traverses.

Fortunately for me Mark was feeling confident and I took the opportunity to take a couple of photographs before continuing on through the awkward boulder choke.

We were soon making our way across the maypole and down to the OFD III stream way. Again we paused for a quick photograph, then stomped on down the stream way until finally arriving at Smith's Armoury.

Mark had a quick poke around whilst I set up flashguns around the chamber and after a few shots we were packing up the camera for the last time ready for the return journey.

Without me taking snaps to slow us we were out of the cave in an impressive two and a half hours and had clocked up a full trip time of just 6 hours with photographs! Not bad considering with my camera I've been known to take that long in a single chamber ;)