A few years ago I helped Dr Wrong with a dive in a slate mine in mid wales. A great little place for the dry caver, with one or two galleries, but with a few bottles to carry it made for sweaty but dry work, so carrying the bottles in normal clothes was possible (as far as I remember) but I took my wellies for good measure splitting them from my normal caving gear. After the trip we threw all the kit back into Dr Wrong's car and then shuttled back to my car so that we could go our separate ways.
Having no plans to use my wellies for another week, i left them in Dr Wrong's car and got on with whatever I was doing that afternoon, I think driving out of llangollen I got distracted by cliffs of limestone and ended up driving through the single track roads through Esclusham Mountain and down to Minera.
The week after following some PM's and posts on UKC, I found myself back in North Wales on a trip into a mine level with a local fanatic called Mike. what a trip we had planned, I again left my car behind and jumped into his van never having met the guy before.
We get to where we were getting changed and I empty my bag, then I shuffle the stuff I've emptied around the floor a little, look under the bag i've just emptied it all from. place all the gear back in the bag and take it all out again. Nope, No wellies!
I'm there stood in some cheap trainers I bought a couple of weeks before thinking hmm what do I do now... I know I'll be wading, but how bad can it be. I mutter something under my breath and admit to Mike who I'd met not half an hour previously, that I didn't have my wellies on me so I'll have to wear the trainers!
By this point Mike must have been thinking who IS this muppet I've agreed to take on a trip.
Still we made our way down the mine past the ladders and assorted bits and pieces that Mike and co have put down this mine, the handiwork is great! We soon get down to the level, and Yeh what a mine level it is, quite wide with space for a boat on one side, and if memory serves me right, the water was between knee and ankle depth nearly all the way. perfect welly territory! Ah well.
Still muppetman carried on the trip, thankfully muppet's feet at this point were not freezing as he just had to keep moving.
On getting out of the mine, there was no option but to put on dry socks and wet shoes for the drive back to the Derbyshire hills, surprisingly wet and cold feet for a June or July evening. Then began the task of trying to get the shoes dry (the only pair of footwear I had on me!), first by putting them in the club drying room while I wandered round in damp socks. Then wearing them to try and dry them out with my body heat, being cheap trainers they absorb water and dirt into the fabric of the shoe.
Finally by Tuesday I think they were touch dry, and I noticed that wherever I was going I was being followed by a duet of tiny out of tune trumpets. squeak squeak!...squeak squeak!
I wore these shoes for another couple of months, as they were not too old by that point and had plenty of serviceable life left in them, I was surprised one day to find that one of the pair of shoes had mysteriously disappeared from my car. So I can only assume that though the shoes had a few more months of life in them, people I know did not have months worth of squeak tolerance!
