We split the 9 people into two groups for this trip to the monster Austrian cave - the 97.5km long Hirlatz. 

A plan was hatched for myself, Laura, Dave P and Mike (Pyro) Young to go to the West to Grunkogel to move the camp there to Sahara whilst the others went to carry on dropping the pitch series in Schwabenland. Everything was fine with this plan until 9pm on Monday night when a group of Hungarian cavers arrived to ‘help’ us out. I was given the job of being their tour guide and they were invited to join our team going to the west. We headed up into the mountains around lunch time and soon discovered that the snow was really deep this year – I mean I knew it’d be deep and the path buried but I had no idea about how deep it really would be until we started to head up the slope. Over several hours we beat and dug a path, often in chest deep snow, up to the entrance. One of the Hungarian cavers suffered badly with this delay – the conditions outside were freezing and the walk extremely tiring with a very heavy bag. Once we set off into the cave it became apparent that she was in no fit state for a multi-day trip and just 1 ½ hours into the cave the Hungarian team were forced to turn back.  

Having seen the semi closed rebreather Rick Stanton used to push the end of Cocklebiddy and after some conversations with John Volanthen about small rebreathers he agreed to loan me a small 1kg scrubber he’d had made – complete with male p-port. I purchased a CDBA mouthpiece from a diver on Rebreather World, an extra p-port from Tecme, an MSR water bag and away I went – armed with some other bits left over from the first rebreather I built – my chest mounted “silent green”. 

The results are below, the whole rig is nice and compact and I’ve done several excellent test dives on it. The plan is that I’ll use this in Culimebro this summer.