We then turned around back to Maypole Inlet.
As we got close to Maypole Inlet, Rufus and I noticed that the water level was visibly higher.
"I'd like to see the main streamway in full flood", I said, "though preferably from a safe distance! I guess it must have really started to rain on the surface."
"It would be awesome to go down it in a rubber ring!" was Chris's response.
When we got to Maypole Inlet, a lot of water was cascading down and out of it, but my only thought was that this was a fun diversion at the end of a rather pedestrian trip.
"Was it this wet when you came down?" asked Henry.
"Nope, we wouldn't have come down it if it was!"
It was not until we actually started climbing up that the flood pulse properly hit, and we got our first hint that we might have a struggle getting out.
Henry went up first, then Oli, then Chris, and by the time Rufus started to climb, the water was seriously flowing. It was at this point I got a bit worried. I had to stand her on my shoulders and push her up. I then had to force my way up against the water.
As I got to the top of the bottom pitch I heard a shout from Henry. He invited me up to look at the next two pitches.
"Do you think we can get up?" he asked. "It'll be harsh!" The ladder was invisible behind the water, and the awkward pitch below it was a waterfall.
I was amazed. We had hardly been in the streamway for 20 minutes. The answer could only be no, though I hesitated to say it.
"Where, then?"
"Down, I guess" I replied, though I knew that that was hardly a better option. We'd have to find an alternative route out of the streamway downstream, which was going to suddenly be an extremely serious proposition considering the rapidly rising water. Still, we could hardly stay where we were, being drenched with spray and the water flow getting stronger as we watched. We were already shouting at each other to be heard.
I climbed down first and I had to feel for the little bolted shelf under the sheet of water. As I put my foot on it, it was knocked off by the power of the water and I was only saved from falling by a one-handed grab for the bolt. I eventually climbed down and managed to help direct Rufus down. We sheltered out of the now-powerful stream in nooks downstream.
The situation had a strange sense of unreality for both for us: we had only gone out for a short bimbly trip and we were now, very suddenly, in serious trouble. A very short time before we had been sitting in the pub. The alcohol from the beer I had drunk at lunch was still flowing through my bloodstream, adding to the sense of detachment.
It took some time for the others to get down. By the time we were all together the streamway had doubled in depth and walking in it was already very difficult.
I had never seen water levels rise anything like as fast in a cave before.
Rufus had the idea of tying as all together. We pooled all our tat: slings of assorted lengths and a donkey dick, and we were soon all joined up in a sort of conga-line.
We now had to decide what to do. None of us were very familiar with the streamway, and it was not obvious which option would be the best. Perhaps none of them were.
It was not possible to get far above the level of the stream where we were, so if the water rose much further we would be swept away. Walking with the current downstream would be incredibly dangerous, and none of us could think of a place to get out of the water nearby. Traversing above the stream looked very difficult from where we were as the passage was quite wide.
We were suddenly trapped in the streamway and we didn't seem to have any options. I wondered if we could have fought our way up the ladder somehow. But Maypole Inlet was no longer an option; it was fast becoming a considerable waterfall.
Henry and Chris decided, in the absence of any other options, to lead us upstream, through the Maypole Inlet waterfall. There might be some place to get out of the water, and anyway at least we wouldn't have the additional flow from Maypole Inlet to deal with.
Walking upstream was very challenging when we had to enter the water. We were right to tie ourselves together, since we had a couple of falls as we fought through the waterfall. I was playing "backstop" and had to field Rufus as she was washed off her feet. Olivia also fell and got a welly washed off. I had a vision of us all getting washed down the streamway together, like a bunch of blackwater rafters without a raft.
In this way we fought our way 10-20 metres upstream. Here the flow was marginally less and, since the passage was narrower, we could stay out of the water by bridging across it.
We rested here whilst Henry traversed forward to investigate the next corner. Below our legs, the water, now the colour of tea, continued to rise. Henry reported back that there was a pool ahead that we were unlikely to be able to cross. He had also noticed a ledge that we could have been reached with difficulty, but it was not far above the level of the water. Our situation did not seem to have improved much.
"Do you think we should have gone up the ladder?" I asked Henry. "Maybe one of us us could have forced our way up if we'd attempted it straight away."
"No way. Look at the strength of the water. Even if we could have, the flood pulse would just have hit us in the crabwalk above."
Chris suggested we go back downstream and try to lower people downstream using slings. I thought this might be suicidal. Anyway, looking back at Maypole Inlet, it was possible that we couldn't get back downstream: the water was now thundering out of the inlet, and hammering the opposite wall of the passage.
"What, then?"
"I can't think of anywhere we can get to that's better than here."
"The water's still rising. You can see that the water has already risen since we've sat here. It's already at the lower end of our ledge. We have to do something."
"If it does, we'll have to climb above it. We don't have any choice."
We looked up. The walls were mostly smooth, but about 5 or 6 metres up there was a sort of ledge jammed across the rift.
I unclipped myself from the conga-line and tried to climb up a little way. It was hard going due to the lack of features on the walls. I made enough progress to convince myself that it might be possible to climb up to the ledge. Downclimbing was exhausting, however, as I had to do the splits across the passage to get any sort of purchase on the walls. This taxed my agility, and challenged my confidence: slipping into the water would have been disastrous.
"I think I could get there, if we're really desperate."
Chris indicated that our situation might be that desperate.
The water continued to rise and we began to get tired and cold bridging across the passage. Even if the pulse subsided it seemed unlikely we could wait for the water to recede in such a position.
Chris then attempted the climb and failed, which dented my confidence a little as Chris is a "proper" rock climber. Still, we didn't seem to have any other options so I had another attempt.
We untied all our tat and tied it together to make a rope of sorts, which I clipped to myself. I then tentatively started upwards. It was reasonably tricky, but I slowly climbed up the passage. I may have been helped by the fact that I had forgotten my wellies and was wearing good quality mountain boots with stiff Vibram soles -- excellent for edging.
Eventually I got level with the ledge, only to discover that it was a collection of boulders and rocks held up by -- well, by friction with each other and wishful thinking. However, some seemed more solid than others, and, considering the situation, I decided to trust them enough to clamber onto. The surface of the boulder bridge was only a little bigger than the top of an average desk, but it was better than trying to bridge across the passage above the water. I felt a surge of euphoria. It was a sketchy situation, but now we had a fighting chance.
None of the rocks looked dependable enough to belay the rope to, so I slung it around one of the least moveable ones, sat on it, and braced myself against the walls.
"Rope Free!"
"ROPE FREE!"
It was only a few metres down but I had to shout several times to make myself heard over the noise of the water. The Maypole Inlet waterfall was thundering downstream, and another, unseen, cascade upstream was crashing in sympathy.
Olivia climbed up slowly, clipping herself into and putting her feet in each sling in the rope. Eventually she got onto the ledge. Rufus then managed to climb up almost to the ledge, but then got stuck. Adrenaline meant I managed to pull her up the rest of the way with arm strength alone. There were smiles all round on the ledge; we seemed to have escaped death. We had a long cold night in store to wait for the flood to recede, but that was a mere technicality. Chris and Henry would surely have no problem climbing up now.
Chris climbed up next, without incident until he got about level with the ledge. As he did so there was a loud rumble and a quarter of the ledge, made up of rocks the size of toasters, collapsed. This included the rock I had chosen for the belay. Luckily I was still braced against the walls, and I instinctively stuck my foot out and caught the top sling with my boot. There was a sudden intense pain in my left ankle and a distant cry from below as Henry was bombarded with shrapnel.
It was a bad moment. I was now braced in an awkward stance at the top of the pitch with all of Chris's weight on a sling tight around my ankle, both of us trying our hardest to hold up the pile of rocks chocked in the rift. As well as doing our best to avoid bombing Henry further, we were also scared that the entire collection of chocked rocks might collapse into the river below. We were rather keen to avoid this. Even if we survived the 5m fall without serious injury, and avoided being swept away by the flood water, there were no more boulders we could use as a ledge.
After checking that Henry hadn't been taken out by the falling blocks, and then making sure he was out of the way, Chris gingerly started playing Jenga with the remaining rock pile. He was trying to prevent key rocks from moving whilst allowing selected others to splash into the torrent below. Eventually he felt confident enough to climb up the sling and onto the ledge. Feeling returned to my ankle as the pressure was removed. From the jolt I had thought for a second that it might be broken or dislocated, but I could move it and it wasn't too painful.
Chris rebelayed the makeshift rope onto another dubious rock and finally a rather battered Henry climbed up.
"Watch out Henry, it's a tiny bit loose!" I advised him, and Henry showed his appreciation of this useful advice.
The remaining rocks seemed more inclined to stay where they were, but the total surface area was now somewhat smaller than that of an average coffee table. There was rather less room than was possible for five people to sit down at once, but we somehow cwtched together, and more or less sat on each other. We roped ourselves together with slings again in case any more of the ledge disappeared.
There were smiles and jokes all round. Assuming our ledge held up, it was now only a matter of waiting for the water levels to drop.
"It's a good thing Barry didn't come. Six people on this ledge would be intolerable. Remind me to buy him a pint."
We weren't too cold. We had survival bags and balaclavas, and Rufus and I had brought a survival pack with candles. We were also cwtched up so closely that we were sharing a lot of body heat. I christened our perch the "love bivouac".
The hours simply flew by. We played word games, sung rugby and caving songs, played drinking games (despite a lack of anything to drink). Oli's enthusiasm was for being alive kept us all in high spirits. Unfortunately Henry's camera was clogged by mud so we missed the chance to get a memorable photo.
Our call-out was for 22:00 and we knew (or hoped -- we weren't sure if anyone would be at SWCC that evening) that a rescue would be initiated at 23:00. However, just in case the weather had encouraged anyone to start looking for us earlier, Rufus started blowing her whistle at 5 minute intervals from 22:00.
It was possible to see the Maypole Inlet waterfall from our vantage point above the streamway and after a few hours we could see that the fury of the water had lessened. Henry estimates that by about 2300 the main streamway had gone down about a foot, and then a further foot by about 0130.
Time went on and we all got quite bad cramp, since moving around or even shifting position required a lot of negotiation and co-ordination. We started to run out of jokes and songs and some of us dozed.
Eventually, after 5 or 6 hours on the ledge (shortly after I had decided to add an inflatable cushion to my survival pack next time I fettled it; I still have a big bruise on my arse writing this almost a week later), we heard shouts: "We've found them!" It was 0220.
We were very pleased to have been rescued. This meant that the water levels had dropped more than we had realised. Paul Tarrant, the first man on the scene made a fairly bold traverse across from Maypole Inlet to reach us with a rope. This was very welcome, as it meant that we didn't have to attempt a dangerous climb down from our bivouac with tired, cramped muscles, protected only by assorted tat.
The rescuers seemed almost as delighted to see us as we were to see them. They had two missing teams to locate, with a strong possibility that we had all been trapped in the streamway; finding us all safe, well, and together was an excellent result. We gathered that they had all been prepared to recover bodies, and were expecting hypothermia cases as a best-case scenario.
We were soon on our way out; we all managed to cave out at a reasonable pace, aided by some very nice WBCRT coffee and chocolate. On the way, we tried to work out what had happened. Apparently the flood pulse had been caused by an apocalyptic thunderstorm had broken less than an hour after we had gone underground.
Back in the SWCC common room it was time for a much-needed pint of gin and tonic and to reflect on the experience in front of the fire. We were in some ways very lucky -- the flood pulse could have hit when were in a more constricted part of the streamway, or we could have been isolated in a section where there were no ledges to climb up to, or one of the falling rocks could have hit Henry in the head. If I had remembered my wellies, I would probably have been unable to catch the sling when the ledge collapsed. On the other hand, if the storm had hit only 10 minutes later we would probably have barely noticed the extra water. It was a strange combination of circumstances, but we had made the best of bad situation.
Since the rescue the general opinion seems to have been that we took the right decisions underground and we have been commended on our preparedness in terms of survival gear. However, there have been some questions raised about our actions which we think deserve an answer.
One criticism we have received is of our relative unfamiliarity with Ffynnon Ddu. However, we had some knowledge of the system and both teams had copies of the survey. In any case, the means by which one is expected to gain knowledge of a cave before without first unfamiliar with it is yet to be explained to us, so we can't accept this as justified.
Some cavers have (diplomatically in some cases, less so in others!) indicated that we should have not have entered the streamway given the weather conditions. This conclusion is difficult to dispute given what happened. However, this is easy to say with hindsight; people with this opinion were less easy to find before the trip.
On Saturday morning the opinions of several SWCC members were explicitly sought as to the viability of the trip, and others were aware of our route. We were advised to monitor water levels, but no one suggested we should not go into the streamway. Whilst we are not claiming responsibility for deciding whether to go through with the trip was anything but our own, we believe this shows that conditions were not so obviously bad that it was apparent to those who might be considered experts on the area.
The morning forecast was for steady rain all day, but it did not anticipate the major storm that broke after both teams were underground. Also, another team did the same Cwm Dwr to Top trip an hour or two before we did, so we were not alone in thinking conditions were acceptable.
To conclude, a big thanks to the large number of cavers who were called out by WBCRT and spent their Saturday nights/Sunday mornings searching for us or waiting at on the surface, particuarly those we didn't get a chance to talk to personally (and also to those who do all the less obvious work done behind the scenes in maintaining all the gear and doing the training). Much appreciated, everyone.
