Herault Cave Diving Expedition : Friday 9th September

Herault river, a few hundred yards from the tent!

We decided to have a day off today, for two reasons. One, we are knackered!! We didn’t get back til almost 2am last night… but a really good evening out nonetheless and so worth it. Two, we need to fill cylinders and prepare equipment for our exploration trip tomorrow.
Until the full report of our trip, I’ll keep the name of the cave under wraps for now.
It involves a walk up a dry river bed and a dry entrance squeeze followed by an unstable boulder choke and then a couple of short pitches which need to be negotiated by using ropes and SRT (single rope technique). All the diving gear needs to be transported to the dive base so it will be a long day out.
The cave was relined by some British cavers almost 4 years ago but no new passage was found. They found a dry airbell some way through the second sump but this was a dead end. The cave has since been relined and visited by a cave diver friend of Nathan Boinet.
Nathan is the local cave activist around these parts and a hard core caver and digger who dabbles in cave diving, but often seems to prefer to get us over here to do it instead!

Nathan Boinet from the CLPA

I first met him in 2007 when we found new, dry cave passage 8 sumps from home in a cave called the Calaven de Seoubio. His club, the CLPA are keen diggers and are friendly and welcoming and love having us down here to help with their explorations.Nathan invited us to have a look at the end of the line in sump 2 of this cave as his friend had lost the way on and had ended up in some narrow rift where he had left his french dive line tied off.

Nathan has asked to dive with us - which I found a bit bizarre - after all, it's his cave, his country and he invited us! So I said of course he could dive!!
So, we have 5 divers bottles and equipment to get into the cave...gonna be a long day!