Andy Sparrow, Seán Tidey

On the afternoon of Friday 26th July and the morning of Sunday 4th August Andy and I have been down to the dig in Sludge to make some progress with the hope of breaking through before the Wessex 90th anniversary on the 17th August. The main aim of the two sessions was to take out boulders blocking the dig and stopping us being able to dig at the 45deg angle Cookie's survey suggests. Therefore allowing for rapid progress on the 14th Aug when its club digging night. On the 26th we went in with the drill and the plug and feathers and had a successful afternoon filling 14 bags with both spoil and broken rock / boulder. Deciding the mud wall was about at its limit we left the bags for the next trip while we pondered what to do with the spoil. On Sunday 5th the first thing we did was empty the 14 bags into the hole / rubble tip underneath the secrete streamway dig. Then getting back to the dig face we pressed on taking it in turns to dig, but with Andy definitely doing most of the work. This session was a constant mix of easy digging interrupted by big boulders that needed drilling, plug and feathers and chiselling. We made good progress and as well as going down cleared rock from the direction we ultimately need to head. There is now room to dig and fill bags in the hole and the hole is about a meter deep. After three hours we were down to our last battery light on the drill and had filled and emptied another 21 bags and multiple buckets of boulder chunk. There is still some large boulder in the base of the hole so we intend to have another session of boulder removal before the 14th. The digging is amazingly easy between boulders with a bag being filled in only a couple of minutes. The plug and feathers is also really efficient at breaking up the boulders. Breakthrough imminent!

— Seán Tidey 5/08/2024