23/7/19

Estelle Sandford, James Begley, Jonathan Riley, Dave Walker, Stu Lindsay, Neil Reaich, Chris Smart

2hrs

Jon and Dave had arrived first, so they headed down to the end to start digging, with Jon at the head digging the face mostly right and forward. There is a roof pendant, which may be a boulder, that is slowly being exposed on the left roof above us to keep an eye on. The ‘chamber’ is continuing to grow, but there is a reasonable puddle now in the floor making non-holey wellies essential! Chris and Neil headed down and Dave shuffled back a place and the rest of us manned the rest of the route. Stu followed down about 15minutes later and took over the top haul from Estelle so she was then focussing on emptying buckets. Chris swapped in as second digger and carried on digging more to the left and forward and did his 17 before the final swap around and Estelle filled the last 17 buckets. Mostly from the right/shelf bit. Quite a lot of false floor stal there and lots of yellow and red clay. Possibly worth our while trying to focus on going down a bit and seeing what the boulders in the floor are hiding, but there’s still quite a few weeks of easy digging around this and the boulders may well need chemical persuasion.