Any idea where in the system it was, Welshfarmer? My woopsie was
Maypole inlet not Maple inlet.
The Maple inlet made me smile. I just put it down to your age lol (I also was kind of semi rescued from the main streamway back in 1983, though we weren’t late or injured, but merely using a carbide lamp due to multiple hire-lamp failures in our group!). Anyway, I digress.
The accident occurred in a series of narrow rifts not far from the Upper Smithy, a few hundred metres after the boulder-choke on the Cwmdwr entrance series. I accompanied the first doctor to reach the casualty in to the cave on Saturday evening and it took about 40 minutes to reach him. Unfortunately a return through that route is impossible with a stretcher due to numerous tight corners and crawls which make it impossible for anyone with suspected spinal injuries to be manoeuvred through. Due to the tight nature of the rifts and the many small climbs and drops in that area, it took a good 12 hours just to get the stretcher out of the rifts where the fall happened and onto the somewhat easier and well trodden trade route between Cwmdwr and Top Entrance. To do this route for a average party of fit cavers would take 4 hours. With a stretcher underground we use a 10X factor, so were working on 40 hours. This is more or less exactly how long it took from that point to extraction.
On my second shift early on Monday morning I was part of the haul team to pull the stretcher up the 30m rescue pitch above Maypole inlet (where you fell all those years ago) and into the higher series, thus avoiding the tortuous thrutching passage along the MP inlet. We moved the stretcher then through the narrow passages and over the top of the Maypole rift into the bottom of Salubrious where we we met by a large relief party. The passages from that point on get much easier and larger and there was an awful lot of manpower available. I left the cave then at about 3 o’clock thinking they might be out by 6. It took them an addition 2 hours though. Those last 2 hours I spent sat on top of the mountain in a bivi shelter manning the underground Cavelink* device and relaying messages back to the command centre via VHF radio.
* The Cavelink units are small very low frequency devices that use an active antenna to send a signal though several hundred metres of solid rock. Rather than tried to send speech they simple work as an SMS system and have proven incredibly effective and robust. A real game changer in underground comms.