Luke, Chris, Ben, Jim
First actual Awesome digging sesh.
Slack Hole Session 1
After Conversations with the farmer last week about making the entrance safer (especially as the field was starting to fill up with lambs) I managed to acquire a sheet of Walkway grating big enough to cover the entrance hole.
We met at Rowter around 6:15 and after very refreshing pre-beers in the sun, drills, scaff and the grate was divided up between the group. Whilst walking through the gate to the field the Farmer spotted Jim and Myself struggling with the grate and kindly offered for his daughter to run it over to the shake hole on the back of her Quadbike.
Arriving at the shake hole Jim and I head to the dig face with Luke and Ben staying on the surface to haul out spoil and tidy the entrance ready for the grate.
We made steady progress removing a mix of rocks and mud from the floor trying to uncover some of the obviously larger boulders. Several of the larger rocks were capped to make them a suitable size to fit up the Tube. It really is a sociable dig having the voice connection to surface.
After about 40 mins of digging Jim took over at the front and more of the small rock and spoil were removed for about another 40 mins by which time thirst was starting to set in and the call for the Pub was heard. No scaffolding was needed to support the rocks we were undermining on this trip, but with a few bigger boulders, holding up the ones above, it was going to be a must for the next trip.
Rob had tasked us with trying to understand what the draft was doing at the dig face by placing a Temperature and Humidity logger to collect data over the next two weeks. He'd had sent me instructions which I had instantly forgotten and the long press on the start button didn’t seem to have the desired result, after cycling through the various screens and more long presses I was sure it wasn’t working but decided to leave it anyway and see what happens.
It takes around 3-4 mins to get from the dig face to the entrance and even after 2 trips it was starting to feel familiar. At the surface we were greeted by Ben and Luke and the new grate was installed over the top.
We quickly head back the cars for a swift change and off to the Pub to de-brief and decide what next weeks plan of attack was. Checking Rob’s logger instructions, it was now evident that I’d left if in a pointless state.
Ben Loves Selfies.... At the hauling pipe - Photo by Ben Marks