Blog Post, South Wales Road trip 2013

Tradesmans entrance 23rd March 17:00
by Steve Thomas

Well, it's looking fairly promising for this week...
Steve Thomas popped over to Porth Yr Ogof to take a quick look at the conditions and although they are borderline, the water is quite clear and levels are dropping.

It's a dirty job but someone has to do it.....
(and it's always me!!)

We have 3 days over in Wales planned. This involves the usual practice of staying at a caving club - which now apparently has wifi - but still no mobile signal.....and we have a pretty long list of jobs to do.
Last week I spent a not-very-stressful couple of hours turning my 12 litre cylinders back into sidemount bottles again by adding bands and snoopies. Then I loaded thick, plastic, sinking line which kinks for a pastime onto a large reel, in the hope of re-lining Cobbets Loop, which leads to a nice bit of dry cave called Upper Cave Water Chamber (UCWC). All being well, I'd really like to take some photos in here.

The line is tagged at 5m intervals. We have survey work to do and Rich has just purchased an echosounder device, which should speed up the process of surveying somewhat.
Over the years, Malcolm Stewart and I have been painstakingly surveying with silva compass, builders tape measure and ordinary depth guage to a high degree of accuracy.
We'll compare data before relying on our new device completely.

Fully loaded line reel. The line is thick, heavy and should last
a good few years.