John Maneely and myself visited Young Blood's Inlet to push and survey the crawl as well as drop off more gear for the aven climbing. We met Bru and Ian P at the Belfry just after 8.30am on Sunday and got changed there before driving upto the farm. It had been raining hard on Firday night and a bit on Saturday afternoon so we wern't sure we'd be able to dive but at the very least we;d sherpa gear down to dive base.

We got down the ladder at about 10am and iIt was fairly unpleasant in the upper reaches of the cave, with ice cold water cascading everywhere. We pushed on quickly though and got the four heavy bags down to the bottom by about 11.30. After kitting up quickly, John and I  hit the water and headed through the sumps whilst Ian and Bru turned around. John dived first but the weather conditions up top meant he had no viz anyway.

Once in Young Blood's we....  

..... unloaded the additional climbing gear and checked on the drill - where I discovered that my dry bag had been punctured - probably by falling debris from the trip before (the bag got left below the aven (doh!). This probably wouldn't have been an issue except i'd manage to leave it in a drip (well it wasn't a drip when we were there but with all the rain it had obviously changed) so now a pond of water sat on my bag. I dried it all out as best as possible, tested the drill and then re-packed it with some silica gel I'd acquired for the job.

We then set off up the crawl, easily passing the previous constriction Stu and I had dug out and on to where we stopped last time. Here the roof was very close to the water, making digging extremely difficult. I dug as much on my front as possible before I tried to get through on my back pushing gravel out of my way as I went - discovering that it is actually possible to dig whilst lying on your back! (as long as you can get your arms out).

I pushed through and John followed me 5m to a sump pool which doesn't look amazingly promising - but is worth checking out. I lay in the water feeling the pool with my feet until I got too cold and we turned tail to start surveying. This was extremely awkward in the wet crawl (trying to keep stuff dry) and we soon both got extemely cold. We surveyed back to where Stu and I previously dug through and called it a day - we need to come back with a divers slate and a simple divers compass for the rest of it. I took several photos of John on the way out before we returned to the sump pool. Dive out was uneventful except for me having to put a rock in my bag to weigh it down. Carry out was slow and hard, both of us with very heavy bags! We reached the surface about 7.15pm and consequently I wasn't back to Manchester till Midnight!!