Novices, lemmings, newcomers

[Johnny]

I am a member of a major Mendip club, one of the largest in the UK, with a membership of over 200. This sounds healthy but when you examine things more closely you find the active membership are mostly in their 30s or 40s. They represent perhaps 20% of the membership, the remainder being more or less retired and often in their 50s or older. Almost entirely missing from the club are the young cavers in their teens and 20s.

A generation is missing. The club in question, by its own admission, is not novice-friendly and is not an ideal environment for a beginner.

This situation applies to many clubs in the UK. So far it is the smallest clubs that have been most adversely affected and several have wound themselves up.

Andy
If your aim is truly to reverse the decline of uk caving surely this would be better achieved within the framework of existing clubs.
Will starting a new club spread the resource of new cavers even thinner?
Surely it would be better to be instrumental in the evolution and maybe even amalgamation (BCA) of clubs rather than encouraging further factionalisation.
Or does this approach deprive you of the opportunity to write your own rule book?

 

[andymorgan]

Which means it's a pity I live in Yorkshire :wink:

Well at least you can do Lancaster-Easegill via Wretched Rabbit, not exactly a bad cave!

You could always move south there is very little in the way of pitches (and big drops) in Wales (if you avoid the traverses) and Mendips!

I for one, although I'm not particulary scared of pitches, do find that noncing around on a piece of string gets in the way of caving. Its only any gooddoing a pitch if it leads to a good bit of cave.

I'm very interested to know what your itinerary is: do you have a planned list of trips for your newcomers or do you (for example) let them just join in with trips you're already doing anyway?

Is their first trip to the Black Hole series in Swildon's Hole, Daren Cilau or perhaps the Priddy Green/Swildon's Hole through trip?

Ok i'm not Paul (!) but the itinery for the first weekend for newcomers at my uni club is: day one Goatchurch and Sidcot (easyish dry beginner caves in the Mendips for those who don't know). The next day a trip to Swildon's Hole sump 1, or sump two if they want to do the sump (no pressure).
There will be over more energetic trips going on for the non-novices.

 

[kay]

Well at least you can do Lancaster-Easegill via Wretched Rabbit, not exactly a bad cave!

But doesn't it have a climb down to get into it? I've got a chance to do it this autumn, but assumed t would be beyond me. Remember, I wasn't at all happy getting down Mistral!

I for one, although I'm not particulary scared of pitches, do find that noncing around on a piece of string gets in the way of caving. Its only any good doing a pitch if it leads to a good bit of cave.

That seems a very sensible point of view to me!

 

[graham]

Should newcomers be taken on arduous "If you ain't `ard you shouldn't have bloody well come" epics to begin with or should they be gently taken by the hand and mollycoddled around something simple and undemanding?

Yup :idea:

 

[cucc Paul]

We took 18 freshers down ofd in south wales yesterday was a bit of a logistical nightmare but they all had good fun and most really enjoyed it... Hopefully we shouldnt get too many drop outs...

 

[cucc Paul]

Hi chris just got round to back reading the board...

Because of the way our caving club is structured we tend to do one day caving trips on a wednessday afternoon/evening which tend to be in south wales and on a weekend we try and get into other caving regions such as the mendips and yorkshire and stay in cave huts friday saturday night...

We normally put aside the first 4-5 weeks of our yearly caving callender which starts in october due to the uni timetable... for what we call freshers trips.... these normally consist of caves with no vertical elements and at most a small ladder pitch say swildons 20 as an example would probably be about as big as we get.

We then get a little more adventurous but also run more "relaxed" trips through out the year...

At the moment were running most of our freshers trips around OFD and neighboughering caves... we done 4 dry trips in the upper series designed to be interesting but not to hard going... and a little more adventerous trip into Cwm Dwr i think it was, you seem to slide down a drain pipe which bends at the end, this was a bit of a soggy trip for the newbies but the rest of us managed to avoid most of the wet.

We tend to plan trips a day in advance as it all depends on uni work load and how many cars we can get hold of for transport... as well as the numbers who want to go caving obviously we wouldnt get 16 newbies in the darren crawl without lots of them getting very wet and cold and miserable.

 

[pisshead]

we have a series of weekday evening trips down easy caves such as giants (upper series), carlswalk and P8 (ladders)...freshers sign up to trips...2 or 3 freshers to 1 leader and 1 experienced second...they tend to know by the end of that whether or not caving is for them, even though none of those trips are at all hard...

we have a big freshers weekend in our lovely hut in the dales a few weeks into term for the ones who are still keen

similarly to Paul we then have easy and hard trips going on at the same time for a bit so that everyone is happy until the freshers are able to do SRT...then they can join in the harder trips

worked well for me

 

[Johnny]

If physical challenge is the aim, there are many ways of achieving that, many of them not involving passing through a fragile natural environment.

Kay
The following thread may be relavent to your comment.
http://ukcaving.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=333

 

[Ant]

You got to way (weigh? - ed) up who you have with you. I have taken several people down Swildons on trips that are complete novices. I tend to take them down the long dry way and back up the wet way for their first trip as a gentle intro. I made the mistake of taking someone over the ladder pitch on their first trip and he struggled to get out.

You need to show newcomers that it is fun and hard work at times, but not to the extent that you put them off!!

Lets be honest the more cavers the more members in clubs. It is hard enough trying to break into the tight groups already formed within the clubs when you first join.

 

[cucc Paul]

On freshers trips we take a variety of kit with us underground such as extra rope, slings, screw and snap gates as well as things as pro-tractions and simple srt kit just to aid extraction of a newbie incase they decide its too tight for them to crawl through and need pulling through or if they get scarred of hights, bit of a lug carrying extra kit especially when we didn't need most of it but if we had needed to set up anything we could have.

 

[Johnny]

Highlights from this thread were related to the Eldon at last nights meet;

 

[SamT]

 

[SamT]

Its like jurassic park innit.

Hang on - is that the Head of DRCO I see lurking in the back ground - oh yes.

and look - its the Chairman of DCA there in the middle.

I seem to recall there were 3 people who signed up as aspirant members too last night .

Yup - doomed to extinction I reckon (my arse)

 

[bubba]

I'm surprised you can see anything at all

 

[cap n chris]

Oh dear, Andy. I don't think you should go to Derbyshire for a while; after lightening the picture out of eighteen people in it I counted ten communicating via standard British Sign Language.

 

[andymorgan]

Looks like radon is bad for you then :wink: