Aggy - Courtesane

After a tiresome unsuccessful attempt to find the High Traverses shortcut link to the Southern Stream a week before and having said that we won't be back in Aggy for a good while, by Wednesday we were ready to find this ''mysterious'' connection, that Mark previously described with 150% confidence: ''it's not this one, this is some old dig...'' 

One-week later Loz and I decided to make a ''quick'' photo trip to the Courtesan and find the ''missing'' link. We stormed down the Southern Stream Passage, Loz confidently lead us into the Priory Road, we went passed the Camp and dropped off to the Iles Inlet. With couple photographs taken on the way, it took us just under 3hrs to get to Courtesan, and what a spectacular formation it is. 

And we also managed to very easily find our missing link, week before we sat right next to it, with Mark repeatedly saying: ''it's just some old dig'', well, I suppose it was at some point... 

Lozed in Aggy - Grand Circle

It was supposed to be a nice and easy Sunday trip to Aggy. Loz and Mark already completed it number of times in the past, the only difference this time was to find the shortcut via the High traverses. Loz wanted to do a decent trip before her birthday a week after. Mark wanted to test his caving fitness. And we even managed to convince Joe to come and join us for this sensible trip. Joe hasn't caved for 12 months so the idea was to get him back in the game after his last trip to Redhouse in April 2025. I was just happy to be caving again after rather less busy caving winter. 

We were doing the route in the opposite way to the Chelsea SS description, so made an excellent progress to North-West junction and down the Main Stream Passage. Mark and Loz seem to have forgotten about the swimming bits in the Main Stream (brrr), but we were still on track for a good exit climbing down from Biza passage into the water again. 

 

 

We found the climb up to the High Traverse and found ourselves in the five-way passage/chamber, which Mark recognised immediately as the way on into Priory way (no it wasn't!). After good almost 2hrs of circling around within 50m on that place, having checked all the possible ways on (no we didn't!), we decided that it is now time to give up and climb back down to the Main Stream Passage and take the known route out via all of the Southern Stream Passage (bleh). We took some beating going up the Southern Stream Passage but eventually were out (with few more little getting lost misadventures that we shouldn't mention here) before the call out. 

After exiting the cave and walking back in the horizontal rain we all decided that we do have enough of Aggy for a while... (or do we: http://blog.dudleycavingclub.org.uk/2026/04/aggy-courtesane.html)

Cavers: Mark B, Loz A, Joe W, Bartek B