Sunday, January 6, 2013

Event de Rodel



Andras enjoying the Rodel
Today we had plans to go the Event de Rodel.
This pretty little gem of a cave is one of the easier ones to access, but still requires a carry and some crawly, stoopy caving to get to the waters edge.

The entrance crawl to the Rodel
It was a much easier carry this year and all except Andras opted to dive in wetsuits. The gear was carried through scratchy scrub a short distance through bushes and up a short, dry riverbed. We then changed into caving grots and chained the five sets of diving gear to the start of the sump.

It soon became apparent that my trainee, Jarvist, was capable of shifting twice as much gear as everyone else in half the time - so we blundered along and let him get on with it!

We were a little alarmed by Andras' 10 litre cylinders, so he devised a hardcore technique for carrying them through the cave!


Even more alarming was his sidemount set-up - which had clearly been designed by someone who had never been in a dry cave in their lives, never mind had to carry diving gear through one!!

Andras watched in awe as Rich and I glided through the water easily in our minimalist UK sidemount set-up. He'll be borrowing one of ours tomorrow to see how he likes it.


This is a video of our dive in the Event de Rodel - hope you enjoy it :-)


 

The Rodel didn't disappoint and I shot some video of Rich and Andras, which had pleasing results - except the LED torch was causing red dotted stripes due to a problem with certain power settings. I couldn't fix this underwater so we had to make do with what we ended up with.
I took out some screen grabs - hope you like them!
Andras sets off




Rich enjoying his 'day off'
Chris taking a break from filming
Chris and Andras meet Tim and Jarv coming the other way
Backlit Chris
Jarvist enjoying his diving
Rich in the cobble 'squeeze' which was huge this year
Chris heading home
Andras
Surfacing after a cracking dive

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