It was the 7^th year of CHECC and the team put on the best event yet in my opinion (except the first one which was just special). It was at the Rotary centre in Castleton so I decided to try and dive in P8. During the week Jason Mallinson contacted me and at the last minute Dave Ryall dropped out so it was just Jason and I gearing up 12.30 to go caving.

There were supposed to be hoards of students around to rig the cave and carry our gear but we were well ahead of them and decided to lug the kit underground our self. The water levels in the first sump looked normal but when we got to S4 I found it backed up once again. Having come this far and knowing what it looked like we decided to have a dive anyway. The usually 3-4m deep sump was 13m deep instead and when I ‘surfaced’ on the other side I was still at 8m depth! Up the pitch for the S5 bypass was flooded and I reeled out line up to a miniscule airbell before giving Jason the thumbs up to turn the dive....

By the time I was back at dive base I wished I’d worn a thicker wetsuit and was shivering. Fortunately 5 strapping lads from HUCC and MUSC appeared and we palmed some of the kit off on them before making a hasty exit. As we exited the cave it became clear that the hoards had arrived. Once on the surface we tried to get back down to help with the extra gear but the ladder was congested with Joel hauling a fresher lass up the ladder.

Some time later our gear did eventually arrive back on the surface – though we surmised we could have had it out our selves faster – but there you go that was our fault!

CHECC on Saturday night was then awesome, I ran the beer pong, the disco was wild and on Sunday we did presentations – an excellent weekend!