Manchester University Speleology Club

8/06/19 How is it possible for people to stay up until 2am (or was it 3?) and still do something like caving the next day? This is insane!!! Science has yet to find the answer to this question. It was definitely a trial by fire having my first caving weekend be the 60th anniversary (ish) reunion. Never has Todd's "my drinking club has a caving problem" t-shirt been more accurate! Here was me expecting we'd drive to the hut, have some snacks, and get an early Friday night before the busy Saturday... Nope!!! Most of my above - ground memories of the Saturday involve a lot of rain. Driving to the cave in the rain, changing into caving gear in the rain, trying to adjust my harness in the rain. It was probably a good day to go caving, I couldn't wait to go underground. Alex was the trip leader, I was second in, and everyone else behind me: Tom (the enthusiastic chap), Eric (the quiet fresher), Caleb (whose name I'm not sure I spelled right) an...

21/10/2018 Seeing as it was our SRT training weekend we thought we should probably get an SRT trip in there somewhere. We spent most of the week thinking our trip would have to be cancelled as the forecast showed it was meant to be chucking it down it down but fortunately on the morning it suddenly changed to glorious sunshine! After giving Ben and Laura (even though she decided not to cave in the end) a quick SRT refresher course we squeezed the 5 of us (me, Todd, Javi, Issam, and Ben) and all our kit into Bens car and headed for the cave. I always find churns really confusing (it just has too many entrances!) so I'm not quite sure where we entered (I think Todd said Diccan entrance) but when we did there was only about 15 minutes of squeezing, walking, and climbing before we reached the first pitch. As we walked out from the bottom of the pitch we got to a rather impressive view, called the window, into Alum Pot - an open shaft which had the previously mentioned glorious su...