Rassemblement Caussenard

The weather which had thwarted most of our trip, took a turn for the worst last night. A huge lightening storm hit the Herault and we had rainfall like we had never seen before. 
We woke in the morning and heard it threatening in the low, grey clouds. Caving and diving was most definitely 'off' and our final plan to try and dive the Gourneyras was abandoned.
There was only one thing for it. To go to the Herault's answer to 'Hidden Earth' and buy lots of toys and get drunk in the company of our friends from the CLPA and GERSAM.

Lunch menu!

Ludo's puppy

Not every doughnut has a hole in the middle...

We had long had an invitation from the French caving club to dive a new sump which was very close to the Foux de la Vis. The group, as ever, helped carry our kit in the heat and set about the entrance of the dry cave with explosives to make passing the gear a little easier.
We had a little information on the sump and in our usual plan of attack, added a little helium to our larger bottles and took some oxygen along too, so that we had all angles covered. In exploration, you never know what the cave will do – if it will go deeper, if it will surface, if it will close down or open up in to caverns measureless to man. 
We knew that someone had been in there before but had very little information on how it ended.
We lowered the cylinders through a boulder choke and kitted up in a narrow rift.
I set off surveying the existing line in very poor, milky visibility (barely 2 metres) and Rich went ahead to try and find the way on.
We came across all sorts of different lines, one of which had broken and was heading back towards the entrance. We spent some time cleaning this up and very shortly came to the end of the line. It was only at a depth of 21m and some 36 metres surveyed distance. 
We had a good poke about in rifts below and above but they were too tight and definitely not worth pursuing. I stuffed Rich into one with the line reel and he laid about 8 metres before climbing back towards me, shaking his head.
The team got the gear out in good time, in between eating lunch and drinking red wine, which had clearly been smuggled past their wives that morning in coca cola bottles……

The walk up hill was hot and my ankle didn’t like it, but we were soon at the café in St Maurice de Navacelles drinking cold beers while I entered the survey data and produced a stick map.

Banquier

Rich in Banquier. Photo: Christine Grosart

Rich and I had the opportunity to have an early morning 60m deep dive yesterday, at a discreet location. We did lunch and chilled out the rest of the day, whilst sorting out directions for the Grotte Banquier.

Rich in Grotte Banquier. Photo: Christine Grosart

Thanks to Elaine Hill and Clive Westlake, we got it together and after driving up some lengthy forestry track, we parked up and did a bit of casting around before finding the right path to the entrance.
A short fixed ladder leads to some well travelled and well decorated passage, which heads down to the lake and then the sump. This would be an easy half an hour carry with dive gear, but quite hot! The sump then leads to 1,600m of apparently quite fine passage beyond.
Definitely one to come back to with dive kit.

Rich in Grotte Banquier. Photo: Christine Grosart

Pool and wine

St Saturnin vineyard

Having worked our arses off all year, Rich and I try and get some holiday time. As well as caving, diving and exploring, we try to grab some quality time together.
This normally entails Rich snoring on the sunbed while I read, swim, sunbathe and repeat.
I often have to save up annual leave from work to get a decent amount of time in the Herault, as it's a two day journey each way.
Relaxing isn't something we do very much of, but we do try.
Camping val d'Herault is fairly quiet this time of year. The pool is cold but the river is still warm and the vineyards are still open.

St Saturnin vineyard

Our new favourite restaurant

Our new favourite wine!

Fab menu with fantastic food

The restaurant is in the Bueges valley, with a view of the entrance of Garrel, the cave we pushed
over the last few years...

Campsite pool

Rich

Rich in action

L'Esquirol

Christine rigging

I had heard about the cave but had never got around to actually going there. This is not surprising as it really isn’t easy to find. Jean Tarrit met us at St Maurice de Navacelles and we followed him through some winding lanes and through an obscure farm fence and down a track to a clearing. The cave was a short walk up from the parking spot. 
With only 4 hangers between us, rigging it was inventive and I set about it carefully. Ashley followed me down and we set up the radio location aerial on a flat bit of floor on the other side of some big decorations.
Ash then buggered off for half an hour into some wretched, muddy crawl while I set up my camera and tripod to take photos of the pitch.
Meanwhile, Rich and Jean set about doing the location on the surface and, true to form, they got a good 'null' with the help of dive spools in a prickly bush.

Ash on the ascent

Ash came back absolutely plastered in red mud having found the most horrid passage in the cave. I photographed him as he headed up the pitch and followed shortly.
Rich then kitted up and headed down the pitch to have a look around the chamber and retrieve the underground aerial.

Pleased with the job, we were heading back to the camp site when we found Jean searching the car for his lost phone. We searched everywhere but could not find it either at the cave or in the road. Fortunately he eventually found it - in pieces in the road a little further up from where we had stopped.
Not a great ending to an otherwise pleasant day.

Ash heading down L'esquirol

Rich radio locating

Rich in his favourite position!

Coudouliere

Pedro pretty much sums it up. Photo: Rick Van Dijk

 The Dutch were eager to head over to Coudouliere and make a few parts of the entrance boulder choke more Suex friendly.
This seemed like a good opportunity for me to deploy my Disto X and PDA combination and get some survey data of the dry passage leading to the sumps.
Over the last 6 months or so I’ve been trying to build up a paperless system and with help from various people, I now have a working upgraded Disto X which measures distance, compass and clinometer readings. 
This talks to a basic PDA via Bluetooth and stores the data in a neat free program called Pocket Topo. This also enables the user to sketch and draw cross sections as they go.
Even better, the data can be transferred via another neat program called Top Parser (Andrew Atkinson’s genius) to Therion survey program. Therion makes my head hurt and we were fortunate to have Jan Mulder (NL) along who was far more confident with it than me.

Gour pools in Coudouliere. Photo Rick van Dijk

One advantage of Therion of other programs is the ability to tie in additional data without having to re-draw – it simply adjusts the drawing as you go. 
But even so, it is not easy to learn and earlier this year I organised a weekend of all things Disto and Therion. It was oversubscribed so I should think we’ll be doing another one over the winter.
I had left my tippex in the car, which I was going to use to mark the survey stations. But we were saved by Pedro Ballordi’s pink nail varnish which Anton took a shine to…

We surveyed the boulder choke down to a junction and took the right hand branch, which led to a different sump, via a steep slope which needed a rope. Pedro set about putting some bolts in and rigged up a rope. The rock was similar to the Perdreau, with poor rock for bolts and we ended up tying into a huge boulder instead.

Anton takes a shine to Pedro's pink nail po

With this part of the survey done, we headed out and were met by a scooter making it’s way up through the boulders. Now that scooters fitted, the next trip would be less problematic.
We retired to the pub in St Jean de Bueges for cold pressions all round.

Aven de Rocas

Photo of Aven de Rocas on the front cover of
the 2015 CLPA inventaire

In 2012, the CLPA discovered several holes in a rough field, very close to Jean’s house in Le Besses.
For a few years I had joked that he had a cave in his garden.
The digging efforts of ‘Academie de Rocas’ had discovered several pitches, some with waterfalls and two of impressive dimensions. 
The front cover of the most recent journal of the CLPA was adorned with the biggest pitch.
Phillipe Vernant kindly offered to take us down Rocas and show us around. As part of the digging team, he knew the place extremely well.
Rick Van Dijk was up for his 3rd SRT trip here and Ashley and Rich stayed on the surface to sort out the radio location equipment, trying to get an accurate fix on a known chamber with a known survey.
Graham Naylor had built us a Nicola 3 prototype and two aerials to try to radio locate the large chamber a the end of the big sump in Coudouliere.
Now that the trip was off, we went to get a bit more practice and get a few more people trained in its use.
The entrance was a typical, muddy dig, with red slime everywhere. The ropes were bit quick too, covered in a layer of thick mud.
Still with a wobbly ankle and a newly damaged shoulder (from getting the boulder choke wrong in Coudouliere), I took my time. Some easy meandres later and the impressive pitches were met. 

Christine in the entrance

At the bottom of the final major pitch, we unpacked the radio location aerial and switched it on. The surface team began laying spools of line among bushes and, despite a fluctuating signal, thought they had got a fix.
Phillipe and I sat around for an hour putting the caving world to rights, while Rick sat in a higher chamber sorting out his camera for the return trip.
It was somewhat unfortunate that he had left his ‘pains au chocolate’ in our daren drum!
Once the hour was up, we switched it off, packed it up and made our way steadily out of the cave. 
My right shoulder was becoming fairly useless at this stage and I took quite a while to get off pitch heads, but this seemed to please Rick who was happily snapping away with his camera and achieving nice results. 

Once back in daylight, the surface team looked a bit sheepish.
They thought they had got a fix, but the numbers and signal had been fluctuating wildly and they couldn’t work out why.
This rang a bell.
I looked up and to my horror, the cave entrance was completely surrounded by overhead powerlines.
In fact, three of them created a perfect triangle and the cave was right in the middle of it!
Graham had warned us that overhead lines would cause big fluctuations in the signal and he wasn’t wrong!

Chris at one of the pitch heads. Photo: Rick Van Dijk

It would not have been an issue over Coudouliere – but here, the village was infested with them…
In any case, the fix point was GPS tagged and the co-ordinates given to Phillipe. He took them home and put an overlay if the cave survey onto Google Earth and …voila!
The fix was smack bang on top of the chamber we had been in.

This seemed far too good to be true…so we made plans to visit another cave – L’Esquirol – where I had never been before, to try again and make sure it was not a fluke. 
We retired to the café in St Maurice de Navacelles which is always a welcome refuge after caving and diving trips. 

Chris ascending

Main pitch in Aven de Rocas

Not our cat!

We appear to have a visitor.

Not our Cat has been sniffing around for the last few nights and today, he decided to make himself at home.
Luckily Rich and I are cat lovers but we are too busy and away too much to get our own.
So we adopted him!

Checking out the spare room

Checking out the spare bed

Quite happy on the spare bed...

Butter wouldn't melt

Found a perfect spot behind the explo box...

Chilling on the patio

Now he considers this his home...

Spoilt by Rich

Sweaty moggy

Sweaty cat

No boundaries...

Is my bacon ready?

I thought he might want a blanket. He did.