A huge vote of thanks has to go to everyone the Eldon Pothole Club met on their absolutely fantastic bank holiday Mendip trip.

As soon as we walked into the Hunters, the hand of hospitality and friendship was warmly extended and this continued throughout the weekend.

Special thanks to Jim Cochrane and Crispin Lloyd of the BEC who let us into The Belfry (excellent hut!) and arranged for Vince Simmonds to lead us on our St. Cuthbert's trip (special thanks to Vince for a magic trip)

More special thanks to divers Phill Short, Greg Brock and Andy Stewart who helped us out in Swildons. No doubt details will appear elsewhere, nice one lads!

I think I can say on behalf of everyone, we had a brilliant weekend which wouldn't have been the same without such friendly folk.

underground said:

More special thanks to divers Phill Short, Greg Brock and Andy Stewart who helped us out in Swildons. No doubt details will appear elsewhere, nice one lads!

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Now come on chaps...... there is such a tale here that it must be told - it is already part of Mendop folklore. Go on, tell us about your Swildons trip....

Andy Sparrow said:

Now come on chaps...... there is such a tale here that it must be told - it is already part of Mendop folklore. Go on, tell us about your Swildons trip....

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I was hoping one of the boys who were actually there were going to tell the tale, but as they haven't logged on for a few days, I'll do it, even though I only came down the day after for the Cuthbert's trip. A full account will no doubt be on the EPC website before long.

A crew of EPC lads decided to do the basic Swildon's round trip - through Mud Sump, dropping into Swildon's 2, then back out via Sump 1. This all went well until they went into Blue Pencil Passage by mistake and ended up coming out into the Swildon's 4 streamway and not Swildon's 2.
So, upstream they go until of course, the inevitable sump appears. Now our heroes by this time knew they were off route, and that the grim looking sump with handline through it wasn't Sump 1, but they also didn't know *exactly* where they were. But hey, that wasn't stopping J, who was of the mind that if it had a handline through it, how hard could it be?

So, off he goes, through the 38ft sump without the usual lead that folks carry to give themselves the -2.5m depth required. "I had to pull a bit" he reports, and fortuitiously made it through Sump 3 to arrive rather out of breath in the airbell between Sumps 3 and 2.
As the next handline for Sump 2 isn't visible at this point, and he didn't fancy going back again due firstly to the rather intense nature of the dive, and secondly because he didn't want to meet one of the other lads (or a corpse) halfway through the sump :shock: He resigned himself for a long wait....
Another of the party attempted the dive, only to catch glimpses of the reaper at the halfway point, luckily managing to turn around and get back out and after this it was decided that J was either trapped somewhere, or dead, so it was time to go back round through Sump 1 to see if he'd managed to get through Sump 2, or if not, to call the MRO.

By happy coincidence, they bumped into the aforementioned team of divers who nicely agreed to go through sump 2 and see whether it was a body recovery or merely a rescue. One of the divers free-dived down through Sump 2 to meet a rather cold and bored J, and at the same time, another diver came up through Sump 3 to join the party. They lent J some breathing apparatus and gave him a crash course in diving to get back up Sump 2.

So, despite the rest of the party thinking that J was a bloated corpse, it all ended happily ever after, and many joyous pints were downed that night.

I'm not even going to go into what *might* have happened as I'm sure everyone realises that this was perhaps (another!) one of J's nine lives well and truly used up....

Here's a picture of how I lost one of the nine.

http://www.eldon.org.uk/history.html

Good job the rock that did that wasn't a couple of inches closer!

:roll: Message for Johnny - So that's what you mean by a brilliant weekend! I like the water but that's above and beyond.... A bit worse than the bung hey :?: