Successful AHPES trip to Ogof y Daren Cilau

As I had been through the entrance bit as far as the Big Chamber I took it on me to speed-lead the boys all the way to this Big Chamber. I had urged the lads not to bring anything that couldn't fit into the inner pocket of the oversuit and this paid off in the 600 meters sustained entrance crawl. We executed it in 65 minutes and popped out into the t-junction that leads to the Jigzaw passage. Although we were fast I was on a mission and as Martin was sitting filling his carbide container with one drip of water at a time in the little stream I could see the record time disappearing into the muddy stream. I took over and filled his baby in 1 second using an onsight glove-filling trick. This was to be the start of a finely tuned team descent where we all helped out where need be, and everyone took leads and followed their respective surveys and books accordingly.

With Martin's carbide filled up we set off again and came to the Old Main chamber. Here we ferret'ed around a bit with me misleading into a brief muddy dig but then we took a good readout from the book (Unstone was in charge of this, where Martin and I had surveys) and 1-2-3 - there it was: the well polished and amazing key into the historical boulderchoke leading down to Jigsaw passage. As we entered Jigsaw I urged the boys to speed (caverun) down the alleys and just focus on getting to Big Chamber in record time. We reached this enormous chamber uneventfully and I headed over to the log book and put our entry in. We seemed to be the first in the cave since February which felt pretty good. The Willerup Brothers historic entry from November 2000 was still in there.

From Big Chamber the navigation starts become a bit more difficult and we were also now venturing into new AHPES territory and the team started to work its magic. Unstone seemed to have realised that he had somewhat the key to the route in the book and took his job very seriously and was quietly exploring some upwards boulderslope while I was following the more natural line past the boulder slope with Martin behind me checking the survey. If you were not attentive in here I imagine you could spend quite a bit of time going down the wrong passages as there are plenty of them, and as we were to discover with Daren - the biggest and most obvious ones are rarely the ones leading the right way.

Unstone seemed to have cracked the puzzle and shouted from above the boulder slope that he'd found some little passage. I was about to argue that it "looked more like this way" as I was entering some big continuations in my direction but Martin strung it together confirming it on the survey and we all rather excitedly entered Unstones find.

Roystone still confident lead us through as nasty flatout crawl and into the Royston 5 ways Chamber. After a bit of discussion I led on - neither me nor Martin was convinced this was the true 5 ways chamber and as before out little team had made a good quick decision. We arrived at the true 5 ways chamber after some intriguing drymud tunneling and as the guidebook says "the way on is the smallest of the 5 ways". Classic Daren style.

This lead us down to Valentines Chamber from which a fairly ugly squeeze (now Unstone was back in the lead) took us further to the amazing 22 meter fixed ladder. Roystone still in the lead headed up this and we soon followed. You can't help but think about Tony White's first ascent of this pitch, in wellingtons and with very little protection.