Coudouliere
Jean Tarrit by the entrance of Coudouliere.
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…
Ash in Coudouliere
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.
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.
Gours in Coudouliere. Image: Rick Van Dijk
To the end of Garrel - by Rich Walker
The Garrel was first mentioned to us by Jean Tarrit back in 2011.
He told us of a sump that was at the end of a cave that the CLPA had been exploring for over 30 years. It’s a big, complex cave system and continues to lend new dry passageway even today.
However, what lay beyond the sump was a mystery to them, and could be the start of another significant area of the cave so he was keen for us to dive it. In 2012, Christine and Tim dived and laid 40m of line, finishing as the visibility was deteriorating. The sump had gone to a depth of 10m, and was heading up towards the surface at a depth of 4.5m at the end, so there was a good chance it would surface.
Garrel - team of 2012
We returned this year with thoughts of surfacing into new cave passageway, and were very excited to going back. It doesn’t seem too bad a dive, to be honest. 90m of distance, and 10m depth. How hard could it be?
Well, the cave diving is the easy bit. You see the sump is 6 hours caving from the entrance. It isn’t particularly difficult caving, lots of short vertical climbs and descents, and a particularly big and confusing boulder choke in the middle of the trip. All of this needs to be done of course with the diving gear.
Jean brings friends with him. They are never the same people, for some reason, so I can only assume he has a large pool of friends to draw from.
One of the climbs in Garrel. Best done with SRT gear!
We set off early that morning, and no less than 8 cavers showed up to help us. Jean was so excited, that he left all of his equipment at home and had to go back to get it. He caught us up a couple of hours into the trip. These helpers were young, fit and keen. At the start anyway!
I’ve been trying to find the report of the last trip here, but I can’t. I suspect that, in the way that you forget pain, the interwebs has decided that the report is too painful to be told. It just means I’ll have to recount the story here for you.
We climbed into the cave down a sloping, low bedding plane just steep enough for you to not have to work very hard. This is great on the way in, but I’m always mindful of how I might extract myself from such places. I slid down to the bottom, thinking about levitation techniques. From there on, it’s a mixture of short rope pitches. We used SRT equipment this time. In 2012 we neglected to bring any because it was a “short, easy trip”.
Christine in the Garrel, passing a squeeze apparently similar to the one she would encounter underwater.
After about an hour, or so, the large passageway stops at the base of a huge boulder choke. There are multiple ways into it. We’d become spread out over the cave due to the vertical pitches, and I found myself with a young french guy who spoke about as much English as I spoke French.
You can make what you will of that, but essentially, unless we wanted to ask each other our respective names for the next few hours, and discussing whether there is a monkey in the tree or not. Anyway, I digress.
My new friend decided that the way on was up and to the left. Well, it was his cave so I followed him.I climbed up a squeezey little hole, and then to a vertical rope pitch.
There was nobody there, and I figured that if this was the way on, then we would have caught up the other team at this point. I tried to explain that we needed to go back to the bottom of the boulders and wait. OK, he said. I went down, and he went up. Le singe est sur l’arbre.
I got found by another of the party and tried to explain. I think we made some progress, and we shouted at friend 1 to come back, which he duly did. This whole escapade took us a good 45 minutes, and we headed on through the boulder choke and caught up again.
More big rooms, vertical climbs and descents, a very precarious totter across a knife-edge of rock like something from Lord of the Rings, 6 hours and a spot of lunch later, we arrived at the sump.
Chris kits up at the sump
This was a beautiful sight. It had a gorgeous green hue to it, and we could see the line heading off into the depths. That was until I fell in kitting up. Brown soup from all of the fine silt was now covering the entrance. I just hoped it wouldn’t drift into the main cave. We were planning to survey this sump, so visibility was needed in order to do a decent job.
After some precarious balancing while gearing up, Christine and I set off into the sump. Chris went first, patching the line and looking around for the way on. I followed behind making the survey.
Pretty little cave, although I didn’t get to see too much of it, focussed as I was on my compass and wet-notes. The passage went roughly North West, and I surveyed the length of the line, and having a quick discussion with Chris at the end to the effect of “it’s all boulder choked from here on” and that was sadly the end of the dive. 20 mins in, 20 out and we were back at the pool again. We had the survey, but no new cave unfortunately. This was a great shame, but to put it in perspective, we don’t have to carry 2 sets of diving gear 6 hours into the cave again. Hopefully the survey will point to a way on on the dry side of the cave. That’s where the CLPA come into their own, and they will make good use of the data, I’m sure.
The reverse trip back to daylight (ok, it was 9pm and dark when we got out) was hard going. Bags seem to get heavier, the cave gets smaller, and the climbs more exposed. I guess it’s just the effects of concentrating for 12-13 hours. The levitation on the final slope back to fresh air worked as well as you’d expect, and I slithered my way back up, just like the “worm” dance move. But only with 20 inches of vertical space.
Typical varied caving in the Garrel. Images: CLPA
It was an exhausting trip and we all suffered for it for the next 24 hours. We got beer, as always, in the local bar. Fortunately they have an outside terrace as we definitely wouldn’t have been allowed indoors.
Our trip formally closed the next evening when we invited all of the team around to the campsite for a BBQ. Spare ribs, sausages, salad, beer, wine, vegetables, lamb chops and moules too was a lovely finish to the week.
Thanks to Jean Tarrit for taking the photos!
Trashed gear after Garrel
Rodel
Andras Kuti in the Rodel. Image: Christine Grosart
There seems to be a bit of a fad about sidemount at the moment. I'm not sure why, as most 'gurus' have rarely dived caves such as the Rodel, where sidemount is absolutely necessary.
It is not just necessary for the awkward carry (walk up a riverbed for 100 metres or so and then crawl on your belly for another 70 metres or so and then crawl/stoop the rest of the way) but underwater too.
It is actually one of the easiest to access sites in the Herault, but if you don't like Trou Madame at low water, forget this one.
I love the place.
Rich in the Rodel. Image: Christine Grosart
It is easiest to chain gear to make rapid progress to the sump and knee pads are essential.
The visibility is normally very good but a second thunder storm ruined it for this trip.
It was a milky 4 metres or so, but a good experience for Ash and Rick who hadn't dived it before.
Better conditions in 2012
I took the opportunity to try some photos and more video but the visibility was nowhere near as good as 2012.
But it was fun in any case...
Rick Van Dijk in Rodel cobble squeeze (advisable to dig it open first and keep away from the line which goes through the smallest part...)
Rich in the cobble squeeze. Image: Christine Grosart
Christine enjoying the Rodel
Aven de Rocas
It was somewhat unfortunate that he had left his ‘pains au chocolate’ in our daren drum!
Chris concentrating at the pitch head
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 at the end of the big sump in Coudouliere.
Jean Tarrit
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 of the Aven de Rocas
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!
Christine enjoying the ‘no footholds whatsoever’ Y-hang rebelay….
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!
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.
Beautiful pitch in the Aven de Rocas
Grotte Banquier
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
Rich in Grotte Banquier. Photo: Christine Grosart
Episode Cevanol
The rains which had thwarted the Coudouliere project - and had also killed two people in Montpellier the week before we arrived - were not done with us yet.
Overnight, during Rassemblement Caussenard, the heavens opened and a serious storm caused rivers to burst their banks. Drive ways simply slid into rivers, caves were in flood and landslides were everywhere. Roads began closing and the rain showed no sign of stopping.
We decided to head home a day early.
Images: Tim Chapman
L'Esquirol
Christine about to abseil into the abyss
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.
Ash ascending the entrance pitch. Image: Christine Grosart
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 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.
Christine talks Rich over the edge
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.
Longer Licanke
The team returned to Croatia for the fifth year of exploration in Izvor Licanke, as the cave just kept on giving.
This year, with the expectation that the cave would continue deep for quite some time, we tried to cut down on deco and dive times by taking scooters. Rich and I purchased a Suex XK1 each and are super grateful to Suex Scooters for helping find us appropriate machines.
Chris in sump 2. Image: Mark Burkey
In addition, my good friend Clare Pooley didn’t bat an eyelid at offering to loan us two of her own smaller scooters for use as back ups.
Rich and I dived on our rebreathers and scooters to the 2018 limit and began laying line and surveying. To our astonishment, the cave changed and turned into a big boulder wall which seemed to be trending quite steeply upwards. I was getting twitchy about my low levels of oxygen as I’d not had a complete fill and doing two ascents would leave me quite thin. At 38m depth and after 40 or so metres of line-laying we turned around to make another plan for the cave which again threatened to surface.
Fun and games trying to remove Rita from a borrowed wetsuit
We did our decompression in 7 degrees and surfaced after a 3 hour dive. I was super grateful for my Fourth Element X-Core vest and my She-P which are essential for dives like this.
The next day was Rich and Ash’s turn and the cave did exactly as we thought and surfaced in a large tunnel.
Rich didn’t have a helmet light so opted not to get out of the water while Ash made his way down the passage and located a further two sumps over the next few days.
How the cave sees us
I elected not to dive again as my preferred dive partner was Rich and he’d declared he was done for the week. I was tired after my 3 hour dive and my deco may have been a bit thin for me, so we started making plans to return in 2020.
The cave is now 1.5km long and the total amount of cave surveyed in 2019 was 601 metres. My team had explored a total of 1125 metres since we started in 2015.
Gang of 2019: Rick, Ash, Robbie, Christine, Rich, Mark, Rita, Jess.
We must express our gratitude to the Ghar Parau Foundation for yet again giving us a grant and likewise, the Mount Everest Foundation for again selecting our project for an award.
Gettin' down with the Beeb
The next stop on my whistle stop tour of the North Sea was an FPSO (Floating Production Storage Offload) a kind of production oil tanker.
It was my first shot at ‘Vantage’ as well as the medic role. I can safely say that helicopter admin is rather stressful and I was grateful to the permanent medic on board for a decent handover.
Vantage is an offshore tracking system and used for managing flights, sometimes 2 or 3 a day on the Gryphon Alpha. I was up to my eyeballs in paperwork but it was nice having a new string to my bow.
“Hurry up” I thought, impatiently.
I was squashed up against the window seat of a Bristow AW139 helicopter, which had decided to take a tour of Aberdeen airport before finally allowing us to disembark.
North Sea Taxi
I struggled out of my life jacket, kicked off my flight suit and switched on my mobile phone, which hadn’t worked for the last three weeks offshore.
I was about to demand a taxi when a text message pinged:
“Hi, it’s Mark from the One Show. Are you free for a call?”
I flew home to Bristol, threw all my dive kit in the van and drove straight down to Falmouth where the Ghost Fishing UK team were already in the swing of surveying large lost nets on the wreck of the Epsilon.
The BBC was keen to meet Ghost Fishing UK and film our work for a feature.
After a pleasant evening meal with the crew and the divers, the next morning we set about loading the boat ready to recover a big trawl net, intermingled with monofilament.
Preparing for filming with teh One Show; Lucy Siegle, Mark the producer and Christine
Lucy Siegle was the presenter of the One Show and wanted to interview me.
I’m far more comfortable behind the camera, doing the interviews myself and I picked up several tips from the professionals as we went.
First, the “walking to the camera shot”. Lucy and I walked painfully slowly along the 3 foot wide jetty towards the camera, Lucy asking me open questions with me trying to answer them without looking where I was going.
If I fell in, I thought, not only would the whole thing be ruined but our team of divers would probably be hospitalised with laughter...
An hour later, the producer asked us for a “foot shot”.
Lucy and I stared at our feet in horror! We weren’t dressed for this! Who wants to look at our feet?!
Neither of us were wearing our Jimmy Choos! I had my scabby old work trainers on and Lucy had dressed for comfort too. Oh no...
So there we were, doing an impression of the opening credits to “The Bill” (showing my age) along the jetty while our team let out audible yawns from the boat. They were getting sunburnt and impatient.
We wrapped up as the soundman recorded background noise (who knew that was a thing?) and we jumped on board Gary Fox’s boat from Dive Action, Cornwall.
Sharing a joke with Lucy Siegle and the sound lady
We always charter hard boats as they can take more divers, making us more effective and efficient and for media jobs, we often like to hire out fishing boats or a second dive boat to assist with recovering the nets. Anglo Dawn skipper Andy Howell kindly stepped up to offer a vessel for the BBC film crew and also for landing the nets we recovered.
Mark, the director, had an ambitious idea to splice the underwater footage of the lift bags underwater and then breaching the surface with the net, by using a drone overhead. The beauty of working with Ghost Fishing divers is that they are meticulous in their planning and it was actually quite easy to schedule the shot.
“The bags will be coming up 40 minutes after the divers jump”.
The crew looked at us with some skepticism but, true to our word, at 40 minutes the drone was up in the air and took a fantastic aerial shot of all the bags and the filthy brown water stain from the nets breaching the surface.
Sharing a joke with Lucy Siegle from the One Show
Once back on the boat, Fred, John and I jumped across to Anglo Dawn to help pull the huge tangle of nets on board and the camera crew got stuck in filming and recording everything they could. I was most impressed with the director as he rolled his sleeves up and grabbed the net and started helping to haul it in.
Lucy Siegle seized the opportunity for a ‘on the fly’ interview as we plucked trapped animals from the net.
She squatted down at the back of the boat, which was starting to get a bit lively as we rocked side to side with the waves.
She began asking me questions about the nets, the animals we were releasing and the problem the plastic nets would cause if left in the ocean.
“So, Christine, tell me what it feels like to bring up one of these nets”
I began answering when she suddenly sprang to her feet, staggered over to the side of the boat and began feeding the fish!
Perplexed, we waited a moment and she came back, wiped her mouth and carried on with the interview as if nothing had happened!
Now that’s a professional!
Lucy was afforded the role of releasing an edible crab back into the sea and this made her day.
We headed in to Falmouth marina to undergo the painstaking task of unloading the net, all the kit and wheeling it back to our cars and Fred’s trailer.
The camera crew wanted shots of us unloading the huge, heavy nets and we set about passing it between half a dozen of us over the side of the boat and onto the jetty.
It was super heavy, stank and got caught on everything.
We had just about finished when the camera guy said “Awesome guys....I don’t suppose you could just do that again?”
We all looked at each other and in unison replied, “No!”
The final cut on the BBC One Show
Every little girl's dream
Chris riding at sunset in Essaouira, Morocco
Riding along a beach at sunset on your Arab stallion.
It's the stuff of dreams, right?
Well, dreams can happen if you make them.
Morrocco is an easy going melting pot of many different cultures.
I spent my entire childhood dreaming about racehorses, winning the Grand National (that didn't happen, by the way) and while my girl friends at school adorned their bedrooms with 'Take That' and "East 17' I decorated every inch of my bedroom wall with posters of a grey horse - Desert Orchid - and newspaper cuttings of the 2003/4 National Hunt championship battle between Richard Dunwoody MBE (my hero) and Adrian Maguire (not my hero).
I spent my dinner money on the Racing Post and went hungry as a compromise. After all, jockeys were hungry all the time...and I was going to be one!
Going down to the start in my second race, 2001
Riding in races was a dream and there can't be many people who realise their dreams. My first race was a 3 mile steeplechase - always one for diving in the deep end - and I was proud as punch to be in the shake up and not disgrace myself.
Young girls who dream of horses watch films like the Black Stallion over and over again and the film always chokes me. Not because it is sad - but because the beauty of the horse depicted in the film is so astounding.
A couple of years ago Rich and I headed out to Morocco with the promise of a sunset ride on some Arab horses on the beach. It seemed to good to be true. Rich had a few riding lessons at home and we headed out.
I believe learning to ride is best done in the real world and not an arena going round in circles.
Rich found his balance and despite one tumble and half an hour trying to catch a very spirited Arab who had the whole west coast of Africa at his disposal, we were soon cantering along the beach at sunset and playing in the warm sand dunes with our sure footed steeds.
Achraf and his arab stallion on the crazy Essaouira beach
A few days later, still hungry for more, Rich took a quad bike and a camera while I met up with Achraf, a young Moroccan boy who made his small fortune by offering up his Arab horses for us western women to enjoy.
I missed a good old burn up so Achraf and I met up and had races up and down the beach, fetlock deep in the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing, absolutely nothing, beats it.
This spring, I invited a couple of caving friends - Faye and Nicky - to join me on a four day trek in Morocco.
We trekked around farmsteads, galloped along miles of empty beaches, swam with the horses in the sea, met wild camels and ate round a camp fire on cliff tops and slept in bedouin tents. We ate amazing food, the horses had at least 4 sand rolls a day and we enjoyed stunning coastal scenery.
Nikki and Faye and some wild camels
We rode through a small village where some children were returning from school. They soon accosted us and were thrown up onto our steeds to get a welcome ride home. Well, to their open air swimming pool which is where they seemed to spend their afternoons.
How lucky, I thought. While these children were clearly poor, they took enormous joy in riding an Arab stallion home from school and then taking an afternoon dip in their pool. They were happy, joyful children and I envied their childhood.
There really is a sense of freedom when you are galloping along an endless beach with the wind in your hair and sand in your face. Just you and your Arab stallion. And perhaps some friends who understand what an amazing feeling it is.
Thank you to Equivasion in Essouira for yet another incredible adventure.
