We have returned successfully from Culiembro, having connected the cave to Pozo del Xitu. The full expedition report will appear on the website shortly, we will also be providing a feature length article for Descent Magazine as well as giving a presentation at Hidden Earth.

In the mean time you can see the coverage we received in the Mail on Sunday and view the Culiembro 2010 trailer on Youtube – http://www.youtube.com/user/casjcave

The headlines are not quite accurate – this is now the deepest cave system explored by a British team – rather than a particularly deep caving trip.

This connection was a fantastic team effort. Chris was lucky that it was his turn to dive but anyone could have made the connection and the whole team made it a possibility.

We had our first exped meeting on the weekend of the CDG AGM – 24^th April and our next one is during the CDG Training camp on 12^th June. We expect to finalise plans for the trip during this meeting. We've also got expedition gear on order so everything is falling nicely into place this year.

I’ve recently given a talk on Culiembro at the Hope and Homes Charity event and am doing a ‘behind the scenes’ talk at the CDG training camp.

Find us on Facebook - Culiembro Exped page now set up

The expedition will be in the field from 25^th July to 9^th August. We’ll be based at the village of Cain, approximately a 1 hour hike along the Cares gorge to the cave and will need to carry all our exploration and diving equipment along this route each day.

Cave objectives

1)     Jade Sump – we are hopeful for a connection with Xitu via the undived sump at the end of the Round Window.

2)     Bolt Climbing upstream in Round Window – there is 500m vertically and over 1km horizontally until we reach the end of 2/7!

3)     Dye trace from end of RW streamway with detectors in gorge, and head of sump 2 in active route in order to establish whether the Round Window and Square Window are connected.

4)     Arched Window – survey passage found in 2009 and carry on pushing.

5)     Downstream in Round Window S4 – where does the water leaving the stream at the end of RW go? 

6) Continue downstream in RW sump 3 after Simon’s dive in 2009

Meet the 11 members of the Expedition Team:

Some new faces and some veterans from 2009 who couldn’t resist coming back when there is more cave to explore!

• Chris Jewell Chris Jewell
• Mike Bottmley Mike Bottmley
• Phil Rowsell Phil Rowsell
• Emma Heron Emma Heron
• Paul Swire Paul Swire
• Jason Mallinson Jason Mallinson
• Adrian Hall Adrian Hall
• Diane Arthurs Diane Arthurs
• Simon Cornhill Simon Cornhill
• Claire Cohen Claire Cohen
• Xesus Manteca Xesus Manteca
•  

The team of cavers and divers spent two weeks in the field based at the village of Cain, high in the Picos de Europa mountains. During these two weeks the team worked in the cave to survey the passages, climb waterfalls and dive unexplored underwater sections. All of the various open ends of the cave system (the Arched Window, the Round Window and the Square Window) were explored further to some extent. It was hard work and every day we had to carry diving cylinders out of the cave to fill them for the following day’s exploration.

In order to make pushing this remote sumps in this cave a logisitical possibility we may need to use rebreathers. This is Chris Jewell's personal semi closed rebrerather - based on a 1.2kg scrubber lent to him byJohn Volanthen, a CDBA mouthpiece, an MSR water bag, a Dolphin ADV and a single cell monitoring system integrated with a VR3. 

The results are below, the whole rig is nice and compact and easy to transport.