The seven hour lunch....

We arrived at the camp site in one piece yesterday. The tents are up (one for us, one for the gear....) and shopping done.
I'm still sick with some sort of chest infection off the back of a cold, so today we tried to take it easy.
I had a phone call from my good friend Jean Tarrit to tell us he was coming to our campsite and we were to have lunch at his house in Larzac to discuss plans for the two weeks.

Fuelled with coffee and coughing like a donkey with asthma, I was driven via some stunning scenery to Larzac - the long way round as the Gourney's are closed for repair work in the Vis gorge.
The drive took ages but we finally met up with Jean and headed to his house.
It was a beautiful, typically French rustic country home with big beams and huge fireplaces. 
We were spoiled from the outset with several courses, including crevettes (shrimp), magret de canard, sautee potatoes, salad, bread, cheese, tarte au poire and a 12 year old Bordeaux.
Many hours later we went for a short wander to take a look at the view over the Larzac plateau which is cave hunting heaven.
Back at the house, we discussed the geology of the caves we were pushing, fault line directions and made plans for the week. Rich let out the occasional snore as he nodded in the armchair.

The plan is to go back to Garrel on Saturday but this depends on me being well enough and we can put it back a week if we need to. 

Herault 2014 here we come.....

Well, almost......

We gave last year a miss, due to a haphazard team and being fairly disorganised re not at all ready, ourselves.
We're back this year to take a look at the end of the caves we pushed in 2012 and to maybe take a peek at some new ones the French cavers are promising us.
Our team has disintegrated - owing mainly to half of them doing responsible things like getting jobs and going to university - and Rich and I buying a house together, which meant that I wasn't exactly forthcoming on getting the trip 'out there'. 

It matters not however, as Rich and I are owed some quality time. The fact that quality time will be underwater and covered in mud, is by the by.......
We'll be met by the usual French suspects and I am very much looking forward to catching up with Jean and the gang - they always greet us like long lost friends.

Preparation began yesterday when I did a 9.5 hour round trip (not even a whole ambulance shift!!) to the Peak District to collect the CDG Derbyshire Section compressor. Last years comrade Tim Webber thankfully showed up to help me carry it up the hill to my van. 

Rich is conveniently abroad and will not show up until the day of our departure....
So today, I spent a lot of time in the garage trying to find things and make them work.
First off was the 'exploratory box'. This is a very important box.
It contains line reels, complete with knotted line which magically knots itself all afternoon at 3m intervals and has tags every 10m. It also has snoopy loops, line markers, compasses, wetnotes, waterproof pencils and so on.

Now, nobody likes a floppy helmet. Least of all Rich, who has been moaning and whining about his floppy red helmet for over a year now.
So I bought him a new one. 
Well, I actually first of all tried to glue the offending part where the cradle had snapped off, but I was concerned that after a week or so of sump bashing it may go back to how it was before = more whinging.

So, I took to the drill, made some holes - and some mistakes - but got there in the end.
One shiny new helmet. Anything for a quiet life.......

"Has anyone seen my eagle?" by Rich Walker

The Aven de Rouet looks like a goer on the survey. A straight down shaft to about 70m, and then ongoing horizontal passage. It’s right next to the road as well, so why the hell haven’t I heard of it before? Needs a look, I think to myself.

 

Christine and I headed over to the site on Monday night to confirm that the cave was where we expected, and to look at how we’d need to get the gear to the water. We’ve learned that nothing is easy here. Sure enough, 30m from the road, across some flat ground, we find a bloody great hole in the ground. It’s about 10m in diameter, and dropped to depth of about 20m, where the water was. There was a steel gantry jutting out over the top of it, and this looked a perfect point from which to lower the gear. Two steps away was a steel ladder down to a small gravel platform perfect to stand on while suiting up. This was looking too good to be true, so how come I’ve never heard of this place before? Weird. Needs a look.

We got up almost before lunchtime on Tuesday and started blending gas. 15/55 for me, Christine and Andras, and a couple of deco gasses for good measure. Tim and Jarvist were going to have a play with some trimix too on a short dive after ours. Blending was creative, as ever, in these sorts of places but we all ended up with something useable in the end. We loaded the cars, and sent Tim and Jarvist to set up the pulleys and ropes while we ate lunch. Seemed reasonable to me. All the time I’m thinking “why haven’t I heard of this place before?”.

We arrive at the cave to see Tim stood on the gantry with an elaborate network of slings, carabiners, stops and pulleys dangling over the edge, and Jarvist at the bottom explaining how things will bang into the wall as they descend. The fiddle around a bit, make some more complications and we have a working 3:1 pulley system, with a releasable deviation, which makes it go round a corner. It’s so easy, I still wonder why everyone doesn’t dive here, and why I haven’t heard of it.

We lowered the gear down (OK, Tim lowered the gear down) and Jarvist makes a neat pile of it in the pool, and we three head down to the water like professionals. Andras starts screaming when he sees the toad in the water. Apparently he doesn’t like them. Christine wanted to kiss it, but I reminded her that it needed to be a frog for that to work. We put on our gear and did our checks floating in the water, and remarked that the blue water had gone a bit mucky with our movements. I was sure it would clear out below us though, and said so like someone who knew what he was talking about. So far so good. I still can’t believe I’ve never heard of this place - it’s such an easy site.

We descend, Christine in front, Andras and then me. Following the line through the surface muck, and sure enough, the water clears and we are treated to pale limestone walls and a vertical passage. It’s not very big, I think. No matter, I’m going to drop these decompression cylinders pretty soon and then the clanging will stop. The Oxygen gets dropped in a small (1.5m round passage), and hangs on the line that has a convenient loop in it. Someone has clearly been here before and understands that you need to drop gear off. The line turns into 9mm climbing rope, and continues to drop vertically through the pretty, white, cave tunnel. Which is still no more than 1.5m across. We are three divers, stacked vertically. There is some difference in approach to dropping down. I prefer the head down and swim, while the others seem to prefer some sort of feet down, reverse climbing strategy. The 9mm rope gets replaced by 5mm stainless steel cable. This is an odd choice, I think. I’d hate to have to cut that if I got tangled in it. Still, visibility is good, and the line well laid. Still don’t understand why more people don’t dive here, even though it’s a bit tight. More gear gets deposited and we start to descend. 30m, still nice clear water, pretty passageway, small. 40m, same. 50m - the rope ends. Quelle horreur! There is some old thin cave line arranged into a not-so-neat birds nest, with ends trailing out of it. Christine decides that this is too deep to be arsing about laying line in a tight passage with potentially much more loose rubbish beyond, and we reverse our direction back towards the surface. Shame, it’s a nice looking cave and I’d have liked to see more of it. Can’t understand why I’ve not heard of it before.

Bubbles. Seemingly innocuous things. Children make them with soap and play with them for hours. They are in beer and champagne. They could be considered to be fun things in some quarters. In a cave, they tend to float up along the walls. If those walls are covered in a fine layer of silt, such as you might find in a cave that was not well travelled, then the bubbles dislodge the silt and rapidly reduce the visibility. If that cave is vertical, then those bubbles do that all the way to the surface, getting bigger all the time. In fact, Jarvist and Tim were watching the pool while we dived and said that it turned into a “muddy silty vortex” within minutes of our departure. They elected to not dive.

Meanwhile, back in the water, the visibility has dropped to something like tea with a splash of milk. Never mind, it’s a vertical cave, and we have a big 9mm rope to follow. We wriggle and turn our way back up the passage and soon arrive back at the 21m stop. We all managed to switch gas, not that it was really needed given the short dive, and continue out. Lots of gear plus steel wire. Nice. Fortunately only a few minor hang ups, and we’re soon at the oxygen pickup, and ready to head out. At this point, Christine decided that she didn’t like it anymore and managed to reverse the team order. Exactly how, I do not know, but she and Andras got past me in a 1m wide tunnel. Andras claims that it had something to do with Chris grabbing his testicles in a modified “touch contact signal” for “move”. He moved. Like a rat up a drainpipe. We surfaced exchanged a few “pleasantries” and decided to get out. I’m starting to understand why I haven’t heard of this place.

Then the fun started. I looked up to see 2 locals stood on the gantry waving. Cave diving is often a spectator sport, in the same way people like to watch car crashes or why Romans went to watch criminals get eaten by lions. Turned out that he was a local caver and had been in there before. Best to not do it with lots of people, he said. Visibility gets bad apparently. Well, they were nice and we chatted for a while. They left and enter local no. 2. His communication was less easy to follow. Basil Fawlty probably taught him how to talk to foreigners. Speak louder and faster when they don’t understand. Get more frustrated. Speak louder and faster. He wasn’t angry, although he did look like a farmer, and therefore liable to say “quitter ma terre” at any point. Probably loudly. He mentioned that he had a similar hole on his land. Bottomless, apparently, and if we wanted to go and dive it, we’d be very welcome. “Just like this one?” we asked - “Oui” came the reply. “Merci Messieur, mais nous partons demain”. He wandered off to shoot something. More gear came up the magical winch thing. Then two girls get out of a car and start running over towards us. They are flapping their arms and waving at us. “avez-vous vu mon aigle”, or “Have you seen my eagle?” To help with translation, they were flapping their arms and cawing as well. Seemed obvious to me. I was tempted to say that it had grabbed my pet toad and I was very upset, but my French isn’t good enough. They seemed very upset, and continued driving around, looking for their eagle.

We stopped for Pizza in Laroque on the way home, which is a lovely way to end a days diving, eating nice food watching the river run, and wondering why nobody dives in that cave.

Grotte - Exsurgence de l'Avancas - by Jarvist Frost

Initial Descent

A 'nice dive' and 'not a toilet'. Well.


Finding it was easy enough - left outside the campsite, past the beautiful stone bridge and first right just beyond, admire the strange deserted country mansion with 'princess bedroom' towers at the four corners, and past the parking area with the exposed mud bands. 'Risk of innodation' say the signs, and a small concrete ford built into the road - upstream here is the cave. Grass parking 20m beyond on the right, and a path leading up to the (dry) river bank, terminating after circa. 30m total from the road in an obvious cave entrance & flood resurgence. I carried my gear up in flipflops, soon realising that I'd left my wetsuit (& fins, regulators) back in the campsite. I return to find my cylinders magically transported to the sump - perfect timing.

The carry into the cave is pleasant, perhaps 50m of passage. Entrance is a boulder slope, constantly collapsing but negotiable with care. Cave passage is mainly walking height, with a spot of stooping. Plenty of space to get kitted up just before the sump, which was for us a pool about 3m across and 7m along.

Initial Junction at 6 metres depth

Silt stirred by first diver

We followed the SRT line down into the sump to achieve 6m depth at about 12m from the start. Here there was a branch, SRT line doubles under the roof to the left, and thin white line beckons onwards. Tim pegged the line out and stood aside for me to pass onto the thin line. The cave is indeed beautiful, and the passage fine. However, it's also extremely silty - there's puddles of ~5cm deep incredibly fine brown stuff everywhere.

Entering tight phreatic at ~40m line length

Pristine view of first diver at ~60m line

In this early section I saw some curious insects - the first had the cross section of a cuttlefish, opaque white and perhaps 2cm along. Another was some form of shrimp, but large and seeming to impersonate a seahorse, with flashes of orange and purple in the translucent body.

The passage was spacious to begin with, but soon passed via angular cross rifts into narrow phreatic crawls with aesthetically pleasing but very sharp and catchy veins of calcite. The 50m point is marked by a labelled arrow. The phreatics would be a low crawl in a dry cave, and there is precious little that can be done to avoid stirring the vis. There is not room for a frog kick, and best seemed to be pushing with fingers off the relatively clean wall.

Shortly before surfacing in airbell - pristine visibility

Start of ascent into airbell, typical of transition between phreatic and cross rifts

At a cross-rift phreatic elbow, Tim caught up with me and signalled to overtake with the camera. Now I got to enjoy the poor vis! I really have no idea about the further passage, other than the film footage Tim recorded. It ends in a cross rift that takes you up to an airbell and an easy lurch over some wedged blocks.

Tim and I were here with approx. 7 mins dive time. Andras was notable by his complete absence. After ten minutes we decided that though we were almost totally certain he was OK & had backed off in the poor vis, if there was a problem (he was in a dry suit, the cave was tight and snagey), we'd rather try to sort it with large gas margins rather than go further first.

Typical sound belay

Surfacing in the first airbell (90m in)

I followed Tim out, I could mainly sense his presence (and slow down a bit) not by seeing him, but by noticing the vortices his fin strokes had left in the brown swirls. Vis was below 10cm in sections (mainly the phreas tunnels). At one point I could not read my long-hosed gauge (the short one I could not even get close enough to see). The line was fine to follow out in such conditions, but worryingly thin.

Conditions on dive out

Back at S1, Andras was present & fully dekitted, having decided to back out after having lost contact with us, finding himself in passage too small to turn in with no vis.

Tim and I decided to dive down the SRT rope lined route, which we believed would gain a dry route running parallel to S1. The SRT line branches off at 6m, seems to go under a rock obstruction or two and then directly surface in a small chamber with a V-shaped cross section and absolutely choked with knee-deep mud. The primary belay was via a loop of climbing rope to a piton hammered into the central fissure. There were pieces of a rusted-apart electron ladder near the top of the chamber, the climb up to the right (+3m) into the passage was not attempted as the 45-degree inclined rock shelves were smeared with mud.

Cleaning mud from regulators before diving out from 'SRT line' sump

We dived out in essentially zero vis conditions. The SRT line was comforting in its thickness, though at the junction the thin line leading off forms a bit of a trip hazard. Via a short interlude posing for photos, we exited for tea and medals. Carrying cylinders directly out still attached to harness was found to be fine.

The entirity of what was seen on the dive out of the 'SRT line' sump

Certainly one to return to, though solo diving and leaving the first sump to settle a little for the return would be more ideal. See CDG dive report C.D.Westlake 14-8-11 for a description of the bits beyond.

Jarv

Push [Poŏ SH] - by Rich Walker

This is a smile. It does not get any more smiley.

It sounds a bit silly really. To push a cave. A cave is an empty void, and difficult to push in the conventional sense like you would push a car that won’t start. Pushing a cave means, to the cool kids, to extend the limit of exploration. To go further in that cave than anyone has been before. You have to be careful here as it is very easy to sound like you are lost up your own arse. I suppose that would need some sort of pushing to rectify as well.

The Perdreau Formi is a bit of everything in a cave sense. It starts with an awkward boulder choke at the entrance. For the uninitiated, a boulder choke is a pile of rocks, stuck and hopefully wedged in the passage of a cave. We are fortunate that this choke is normally dry, so we can get through it without dive gear. This often involves some pushing as well, but more like what you would do with a car. Or a turd. 

Once you have got past the choke, you arrive in a large chamber at the top of a 45degree slope. The slope is slippery, but manageable. We put a rope on it though and descend down the slope well protected as at the end of the slope is a vertical drop, 20m high. If you were to loose your footing on the slope and fall off, you might be lucky to land in the sump with a splash, but you would probably bang on a few rocks on the way down, and more likely splatter somewhere in the boulder strewn area at the bottom. You might survive, but then you’d be faced with being pulled up the 20m pitch, up the slope and pushed (there’s that word again) through the boulder choke again.

Tim Webber and Jarvist Frost had done a fantastic job sorting out the vertical section of this cave. They had built a system of tensioned lines, pulleys, hauling lines and brakes that would have looked good on a Spanish galleon. Moving the equipment up and down the pitch was considerably easier than the brute force methods we’d employed last year, and made the trip run significantly faster.

The sump at the bottom of the pitch is well lined, and normally clear. We dived it last year and it was a short, but very pretty trip. The walls are white and the water has a blue tinge to it. The passage twists around, through an easy restriction to a maximum depth of 19m, where it comes up steeply into a large airbell. It takes about 5 minutes to cross this sump, whereby you are faced with a steep wall 3m tall, at about a 70degree incline. The way on is this way. Climbing the wall is precarious, but manageable with small cylinders. The second sump is found on the other side of this wall at the bottom of a couple of round pots.

Tim and Jarvist had been hard at work in the airbell too. They had installed for us a wire ladder to climb the wall, a gear line to clip off bigger cylinders and similar assistance on the descent into sump 2. This was to be critical when we returned later in the week.

Diving in the second sump, the line is not so good. It is often loose, and many belays have come free, so the first dive this year was to check the state of this line, effect some repairs and to have a quick look to the end of the line laid by Joe Hesketh and Osama Gobara on last years project. Their line was excellent and the reel was there waiting for our return. The line ended at a depth of 29m. The passage had dropped down 20m from the tie-in on the main line and we had been concerned about the cave heading into deep water. Spending a few minutes looking at the way on was time well spent, as it seemed that the passage levelled off, at least for as far as we could see. This was good news to us - shallow means more time exploring and less decompression.

Christine and I had a chat back at the surface about our decompression strategy. We had expected the cave to head deeper much more quickly than would now appear, which would require a more significant decompression strategy - this in simple terms meant a lot of decompression gas was needed. Given our look at the end of the line, we decided not to pull in the big decompression cylinders, and stick with a smaller volume of oxygen, for use at 6m, rather than the big cylinder of 50% nitrox for 21m decompression. This was a gamble, but would make the logistics significantly easier. For our return dive to “push” the cave, we had mixed gas for a maximum of 60m in two large 15 & 12L cylinders each, and a small 5L cylinder filled with oxygen for decompression. We were diving in wetsuits, which in 11C water would be a push on a longer dive, but as long as we limited the dive time to an hour, we figured we’d be OK.

On the day of the dive, the gear went in very smoothly with assistance from Jean Tarrit and friends from the CLPA. These people have been so good to us in our efforts here, and never fail to turn up to help out. It’s not always the same people though, so maybe word is getting out ;-) All we needed to haul in was the cylinders, the deco gas and the wetsuits, as we’d left all of the other gear in after the first dive.

Chris and I dived through sump 1 and were ably assisted by Tim and Jarvist, and we pushed and they pulled our heavy cylinders up the rope to the start of sump 2. Kitting up in sump 2 was a bit more awkward, but again our helpers did a sterling job of pushing us into the water ready to dive. The oxygen was handed down, and we set off. After depositing the oxygen at a suitable place to do the deco, we headed off down the line. This had come loose again and floated into the ceiling (I hate blue polyprop). We missed the junction as it had itself floated into and behind a crack in the ceiling, and we arrived at the old end of the line. Very puzzled, we backtracked, and this time spotted the junction, more visible from the other angle. We still weren’t pushed for time, so we headed off to the end of the line. Pushing on through a patch of low visibility left from our dive 3 days previously, we soon came across the start of Joe and Osama’s line. Junction marked, and away we went, soon reaching the reel that had been waiting a year for our return.

I picked it up, and looked at Chris. She had her survey gear out, and we exchanged an OK and we started to swim. I like to keep the number of tie offs to a minimum, and if possible to have spotted the next one before I leave the current one. This makes the surveyors job much easier, as the line doesn’t wave around, and tying off takes time, slowing down the act of pushing. The cave made this pretty easy, as it soon turned from large open passage into a narrow rift, 2m across at an angle of about 45degrees. It was probably 20m high in places, pale walls with delicate mineral veins extending from the rock. It was pretty silty, and as usual in places less well travelled, percolation from your bubbles traveling up the walls quickly reduced the visibility, meaning that constant motion is preferable. I put in 6 tie-offs before the reel was empty, a total distance of around 50m. Looking ahead, the rift appeared to get narrower, although probably passable. My gut tells me that there is something else though. Maybe it surfaces at the top of the rift, or perhaps there is another connection we have missed along the new line.

I glance at Christine and push my thumb up (quiet at the back). She returns the compliment and we head for home, 25 minutes after leaving the airbell. Now it was time to see how well my line was laid and whether it was easy to follow in low visibility. My ability to write the blog says that it was good enough, I suppose. We got back to the oxygen and given that the dive had not gone anywhere near as deep as expected, decided to not bother with any decompression and get back to the warm. We surfaced at around 40 minutes, with an empty line reel, my knife that I had found after loosing it on the first dive and a full survey of the line we’d just laid. A proper good day out!

An evenings ramble

One of the caves we have been considering visiting is the Foux de la Vis - or the 'Source' de la Vis.
As the name suggests, it is the 'Source' of the river Vis which carves a mammoth gorge to form the Vis valley.
We were already part way there after the Rodel, so we set off in the direction of the Cirque de Navacelles (as nobody but me had seen it yet) and then on to the Source.

It was very impressive and absolutely beautiful. The massive underground river was pumping out and the resulting river was gin clear and turqoise.
The old mill was clearly a popular tourist site and there were wild flowers and shady glens a plenty.

Cirque de Navacelles



Cirque de Navacelles panorama

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