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Members Present: Don, Sharman
Sharman and I finally, and successfully, managed to bottom Swan Dike this past weekend. No real issues. We quickly made our way to the bottom of the first pitch, managing to keep fairly dry along the way. We each pulled a bag behind us as we went through The Trick, which we entered feet first, with Sharman leading the way.
Parallel Lines, the passage that follows, was cold and wet, and it felt like it took forever to get to Nasty Weather 1 pitch. This was easily rigged from a knob of rock at the pitch head which didn’t look very secure. This pitch is described as free-climbable or a hand-lined climb in NFTFH, but I think you’d have to be pretty suicidal to do so as it’s incredibly exposed.
Nasty Weather 2 follows almost immediately. This was rigged with two slings around two different rocks and drops down an aven. At the bottom a short traverse/crawl along the right-hand side of a large open rift leads to a short muddy, flat-out crawl ending at a short drop down a body-sized hole into a very small chamber. The only thing we could find to rig from was a jammed block which you unfortunately have to sit on while rigging, which made getting on the rope a bit awkward, but not too bad.
The pitch lands in a large aven with lots of water. A very low crawl at the base of the pitch, leading back under, is the way on. This was very low and wet. The crawl is also the most painful section of passage that I have ever been through in a cave and involves 15-20 minutes of mainly flat out crawling over a scalloped passage with lots of sharp, protruding rocks. According to NFTFH the passage improves and gains in height downstream, but this is a lie. The passage doesn’t improve in size until about 15 feet before the final pitch. This was rigged from a very small protrusion of rock. At the bottom of the pitch the water flows into a hands and knees crawl in a rift for 6m or so before ending at a free-climbable pitch, at the bottom of which is a sump.
The trip out was uneventful. On the return through The Trick Sharman went through first and took a rope with him (or rather two ropes tied together as we didn’t have a rope long enough) which he carried in his hand. We then pulled through the two tackle bags separately, with Sharman’s harness travelling alone on the third and final pull through. I would highly recommend to anyone going through this crawl that you undo all of the straps on the bags, otherwise they will almost certainly get caught on something.
Nothing else to note on the trip out apart from the fact that the entrance climb was very loose, something I hadn’t noticed on the way in. There are a lot of big rocks that move anytime you put any weight on them. We found it safest to try and stay on the scaffolding as much as possible when climbing.
The total trip time was 5 hours, which is kind of surprising as the cave doesn’t seem that long (apart from Parallel Lines). Then again, having just checked the survey the cave is in fact 810m long. This is a good trip if you’re looking for a challenging two man trip that doesn’t take a lot of gear.
It’s nice to have finally bottomed a cave with Sharman, or anyone for that matter. Having just checked the record I keep of all the cave trips I’ve done, this is the first trip out of a total of 16 that I’ve done with Sharman since January 2018 that we’ve actually finished.
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