A joint report from Caving Pig and Captain Underpants, in which we demonstrate that even Sunday hangover trips offer plenty of scope for cave conservation.
Two of us found ourselves surprisingly not too hungover to go caving this Sunday after CHECC and decided to have a look at Lionel's Hole. We didn't get as far as reading the description, but took photos of the survey. We made initial excellent progress past the spiders at the entrance and were soon investigating polished-looking locations around the boulder chamber, until the squeezes became too committing and rough to seem reasonable options for onward progress on the round trip. We found a loop and thought we might have discovered The Pit (it wasn't), where looking down the ~2.5m hole we saw a wet rag and what looked like a bit of deviation tat. We joked that it might be a pair of pants, and conservation-minded individuals that we are, decided that pants do not belong in a cave unless worn on a person. They had to come out. Ash inserted his legs down the hole but decided that although he would probably just about fit, the vertical return might prove more difficult. I'm narrower and would have slipped down, but there were no visible footholds and I didn't particularly trust my arm strength to get me out. So we invented the game of Underpants Fishing.
Ash fashioned some tackle by knotting a sling around the gate of a krab to hold it open, then wedged himself in the hole and started dangling. After some concerted waving efforts he actually managed to hook the material and excitedly reeled it in. THEN DISASTER STRUCK! Ash's hand was mere inches away from grabbing the offending item when it slid off and assumed a new position that was both further away and flatter, and therefore much more difficult to hook. We took it in turns for a further ten minutes or so before accepting that this method would not work. By this point, we had invested well over half an hour in trying to get the material, so there was no way we were going to give up now.
Fishing
Ash decided to brave the squeeze, which was a helmets-off endeavour. After some (different) tackle adjustment accompanied by chants of encouragement we'd learnt from SUCC over the weekend, his feet finally touched the floor and he was able to pass up both the mysterious tat (a rubber seal) and the object of our obsession, which was revealed to actually be a ripped pair of Y-fronts! The thrutch out went better than expected and in the end Ash did not even need the sling I lassoed him with in case hauling was required.
Further "route-finding" brought us rather close to dinner time, and although we'd have had plenty of time on our call-out if we'd successfully navigated the round trip, we didn't actually want to return home at 2am after a long drive back, so we took the decision to turn around after finding the streamway and having a look at the sumped bypass to Junction Chamber. Throughout the trip, we kept noticing more and more bits of things that shouldn't have been in the cave, so it became a bit of a competition as to who could yell LITTER! the most times. (obviously we brought out everything we found!)
We remain puzzled as to why there was a torn pair of pants down a small hole in this cave. Did someone get a little bit excited after Rostam's rousing rendition of Lay Me Down in Mendip's Pastures at CHECC? Or had they simply shat themselves at the loose boulders and didn't wish to carry the evidence out? I suppose we may never know, but at least the cave is a bit tidier now.
Lionel's haul + Captain Underpants' new acquisition
Assorted plastic (small bags, chocolate wrappers, unidentifiable fragments), gear tape in at least 4 different colours, a bit of a plaster (the sticky bit not the gross bit, thankfully), some black duct tape, some orange material tape, a bit of bandage, bits of oversuit, what looked like a home-made rubber seal, a broken snoopy loop, a smashed bulb, a couple of batteries, a nail, a screw, a small buckle, a brass eyelet, a jigsaw piece, two identical ripped-off pockets (?) in completely different parts of the cave, and of course, the underpants.
Cave conservation is something we really emphasise in both the clubs I cave with, and right from the first novice trips, we try to instil good habits. Here's a small effort from a Swildon's upper series trip the other week, where we had two freshers on their very first underground trip helping to spot and reach batteries and wrappers after I found some cans with rancid cider, strimmer cord and gear tape. Obviously these trips are nothing compared to the effort put in by many others posting on this thread, but I hope they will remind people that every little helps!
