Event de 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.

Andras in 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.

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.