Home | Tales from IJLB | Roll of Honour | What's New | Contact Us

About the only thing I didn't enjoy at all on EL was pot-holing.

I'm not claustrophobic or anything but I just didn't see the point in dragging myself by my finger-tips through the Gravel Squeeze into a small chamber only to be told that it was blind and the only way out was back through the Squeeze.

It might have been more bearable with decent lamps but we were saddled with carbide lamps that wouldn't look out of place in a Victorian mining saga.

I understood the point that, unlike battery powered lamps, carbide could be relied upon but the sodding lamps were so old that the reflectors reflected less than a very unreflective thing!

Four of us, plus instructor, were in a gallery that had several dark, wet and thoroughly uninviting tunnels leading off.

We were nominated to set off down one each and to return with a report on where they went.

I have to confess to getting 'windy' once mine narrowed to a sort of L-shaped passage where I could only move on my side with my head in the upright part of the L and my body sort of twisted in the horizontal part.

Eventually I bottled out and backed up to where I could turn around. The only thing I can say in my defence is that my carbide lamp ran out of water so the flame died. I cannot remember ever being in such complete darkness and I've never experienced that kind of total disorientation since (I used to do a lot of diving until recently and even when my twin-set got hooked up inside a wreck and my attempts to free myself stirred up so much silt, that the viz was zero), I've never experienced the sense of being so vulnerable as at that time in that hole in the ground.

When I fumbled my way back into the main chamber, I refilled the water in my lamp from a puddle, re-lit the lamp and sat there with the instructor until the last of us returned. He asked us what we'd found. I should have said that I'd bottled-out but instead I said that the tunnel was blind.

I was that rattled that it never occurred to me that the instructor knew it wasn't.

I was probably marked down for that but I don't remember.

Mike Prince