Andy Sparrow, Gary Powell, Seán Tidey

Andy, Gary and I met at the Wessex at 7 and began the now familiar routine of heading to the dig.

On reaching the secrete streamway I climbed up to check out the last bang and begin removing the rock. What I was met with was quite a surprize. After previous bangs almost all the rock had been shattered into pieces not much bigger than a fist. These could easily be piled into the half barrel, pulled under the person at the face and dumped until the streamway was clear enough to begin drilling again. This time though the rock had shattered into 5 very large pieces, including some from the right hand wall (all the banging having been done in the left). This proved very hard to remove and involved slings, ropes and lots of profanities. The rock here has quite a lot of faults in causing this to happen. Eventually Andy and I got most of it out with just one whopper left slap in the middle. The plan is to tackle this with plug and feather on the next trip. We had been talking about creating a turning round space in the streamway at some point as so far its a case of wriggle in and wriggle backwards to get out. Inadvertently we have almost done this. Once we had removed as much as we were going to be able to it was time to start drilling. The clubs new 4AH drill battery made its debut and made short work of the rock, making two 60cm holes and still showing two lights on the battery! Andy and I swapped places so Andy could rig the bang. We then retreated to just below Castle Falls where Gary got the press “the button!”, making what sounded like a good explosion.

Standard exit procedure, no pub.

We will wait and see what next week brings.

Seán

— Seán Tidey 12/05/2024