With Jake, Nick and Matt.
Vince doing the digging bit, Matt hauling up the rift, Jake started on the shuttle but came up to load the skips, Nick did the haul and shuttle.
The bang had a reasonable effect and there was plenty of fractured rock to move, would have been better but one of the holes blew out, but I might have loosened it when I slipped while climbing out of the rift, would have been spot on had it gone.
Once the rock was cleared the sediment comprises silty sand and some fine gravel, there is the occasional piece of fragmented ancient flowstone within the sediment. Most of the time I was sat down and shovelling spoil into the bags. Now the way ahead has been cleared of some sediment it appears we are starting to follow a phreatic partially sediment filled tube, that is about 1.25m wide at the base and about 0.6m in height. There is a solid rock floor. The hardest part is loading the bags and rock into the skip, the step up is a couple of metres. I was rather warm in my plastic suit.
The bags and rocks shifted today and stacked in the entrance will be cleared out on Tuesday evening when I will be drilling some more holes. We will probably fill a few more bags of sediment too.
I got the video camera working but need to sort out the footage, it stopped when the battery died after about 1.75hrs and on a 10 minute cyclic record there’s a lot of editing to be done.