UKH

Went to a great talk at the Hay Winter Weekend this evening with Louise Minchin and Lee Craigie.  Great except for Louise Minchin's reference to wild caving. Which, upon further clarification,  is also known as caving 

Real cavers go potholing

I think it would be OK to say that full on caving is pretty 'wild' in my experience.

Real potholers go to the gym then the pub

https://maps.app.goo.gl/TExug2TduTBnPRe97?g_st=ic
 

Wild camping or as I know it; camping. ⛺

sometimes I put my trail shoes on and go wild running. It's the new thing ya know?

I put my boots on and engaged in some wild wandering, then I went overboard and coupled that with wild pondering. I should make a TikTok.

I went into Tesco yesterday without a bag or a list. If that isn't wild shopping, I don't know what is.

I was out doing some planting the other day. I think I may have invented wild rewilding.

I went wild biking earlier today 

The wildest caving is 'cave diving'. Those people are ...

I recently read 'Other Ways to Win' by Lee Craigie. The best book I've read for ages and I read a lot of books. For me this was un-put-down-able. Fair to say Lee does some pretty impressive things on a bike, just not 'wild biking'  

Nah, that's known freestyle shopping. Wild shopping is just a new name for foraging.

https://divernet.com/scuba-diving/how-cave-diver-stretched-world-depth-reco...

I heard about naked running. You can imagine my outrage and embarrassment, when I found out it was just running without a watch.

sure it wasn't trail biking? or cold weather/open country biking (to use the swimming lingo)

I blame the current  re-wilding fad. 

There's Urban Caving where you grub about in Rat Piss infested Culverts and drains full of Shopping Trolleys and Dead Hookers.

how about ‘free shopping’? Or as we call it in the north.. shopping. Bit like soloing

Absolutely stunning! It's about as far removed from 'normal' caving as going to the moon is from skydiving.

Agreed, sounds very brave and technical.

Also to me it sounds terrifying and very dangerous, I imagne things could go very wrong very quickly if you make one mistake, which could be very easy to do with the usual narcotic effects of nitrogen at depth. With no chance of help/rescue.

Free shopping?? Isn't that just 'nicking stuff'? 

I'd recommend 'The Darkness Beckons' by Martyn Farr if you haven't read it. It's a history of cave diving written by a cave diver and it's pretty sobering stuff, full of (often fatal!) incident. It never appealed to me even at the peak of my caving. It's why I consider the rescue of those Thai boys from their flooded cave as an astounding miracle of our times. Very sadly, one of those boys died just earlier this year.

Biscuit for that man!

or 'The bladder weakens' as its known in certain caving circles........

I assumed that was the joke.

Sounds classy!

Very odd effect that book has.

Someone I know who used to be a fanatic diver, he's never been in a cave though in any capacity. His diving mostly Mediterranean wreck diving. He read "The darkness beckons" and was really disturbed by some of the stories. Shortly after he got a very bad case of the narcs at deep wreck dive and started thinking about "dead man's handshake" so unpleasant he never dived again. That's a bit of a sad story really, he lived for diving.

Conversely, as someone who loves getting underground (more mines that caves but either will do) and never dived, after hearing that from him I was intrigued and bought a copy. I got about 1/2 way through and was so: "Fk yes got to have some of that"  I signed up right away for a PADI open water (yes more interested now in BSAC, that's not the point here)

Each to their own!!

At Uni we called it Hotpoling. We had a club t-shirt with the slogan and everything.

An excellent read, I used to do quite a bit of caving, mainly Yorkshire Dale's and the Mendips. I will always remember getting to the bottom of Aquamole Pot and a diver surfaced - he was on his own, alone down there! They are a special breed indeed! 

Just been having a gander at antonyms for "wild". I think my favourite for taking the piss out of any occurrence of this societal rash of wild activities would be "refined".

So for the OP something along the lines of "I'm only into refined caving myself", "ooh what's that", "it's the same as wild caving you twanet"

And similarly for other inappropriate uses of wild this or that.

The best putdown of wild was of course uttered by Gerald.

And thinking about that, maybe a synonym would be better than an antonym "I'm into livid caving myself".

sure it wasn't wold caving (or wild raving) - you need a ghetto blaster small enough to get in and out of course, in the latter case

Brilliant, thanks for that. I have driven past that cave entrance to the  Font Estramar on the A9 many times without knowing what it was.

E

When he gets to his deepest point and the passage is still wide open it's a bit like a cliffhanger ending to a drama series. That's what true exploration is all about. There's no way of finding out without someone physically going to look. Even in this crowded island there are still places where this is the case. Last time I heard the way on in Black Keld (resurgence for Mossdale Caverns) near Kilnsey is still open and unexplored.

That would drive me nuts, I'd have to go further. The cost is huge when getting in to mixed gas rebreathers, then you start making your own kit.

Pushing physical limits with home made deco schedules gets really scary, history is littered with horror stories.

Serious beyond belief.  'The Darkness Beckons' by Martin (Martyn?) Farr remains a must read - utterly compelling.

As an aside, the guy on the left in the team photo looks like a late 80's climbing catalogue... 

An excellent book!

I lived in S Wales for a few years, and became very good friends with a cave diver... he became best man at my wedding eventually. I was and am a climber/mountaineer, and have done some scary/stupid stuff in the last 50 years.....but.....

One day my cave diving friend, after some appropriate training beforehand, persuaded me to give cave diving a go.... oh my bloody god.....it was THE most scary/frightening thing I've ever tried....it was the first and last time. I'm still able to replay it in my head, and I still get scared.... and I only swam in 50m....

Still climbing though....

But cave diving? No

Barbeg

Up in the Dales I was never tempted after seeing first hand what cave divers were often heading into - restricted with poor to zero viz! I carried kit down to the bottom of Large Pot and watched our man force himself into what was basically a slightly oversized toilet u-bend, carrying a single hand-held bottle. He was in and out in less than five minutes confirming that it really was impassable. By profession he was a fireman so I suppose cave diving was a bit of relaxation. I'm surprised your friend persuaded you. Back in the eighties and nineties it seemed to me that CDG had a policy of not promoting new recruits. I think you had to be sponsored and to be a caver first and foremost. Not that I was ever going to apply!

There's a world of difference between sump divers and cavern divers. The UK crowd are a very "special" breed. All the standard diving rules are redundant, solo dives being safer as you only get yourself in trouble. 

The tale of the fatal dive at Malham stuck in my head, getting wedged in the gravel within reach of the surface.

Mark Ellyats Ocean Gladiator is another good book , for a different view of deep diving. The Coniston mine dive was an interesting read

Longshot but earlier tonight before reading this thread I just suggested "The Darkness Beckons" to my wife for her family's secret santa to me and was told it was beyond budget.  If anyone has a copy they want to pass on to a good cause....

"The Last Dive", by Bernie Chowdury, is a good read for anyone who wants to learn all about the mysteries of cave and wreck diving and also a bit cheaper than the tome above!

I’ve done quite a bit of cave diving over the last 15years or so. I started normal diving at university and then fancied it as a technical exercise so we went a got some proper training with some mates. My cave diving is mostly in large resurgence type caves in Florida and France. These generally have half decent visibility of 2-30m and are rarely smaller than half a door for any extended distance. We’ve been surveying a cave in the Dordogne for the last decade.

If you approach it with a similar mindset to learning to fly or some other high risk procedure-based exercise like working on high voltage or a railway, it’s really not the horrific, adrenaline fuelled thing that most people imagine. I’m a wimp, don’t do rollercoasters or fast cars and I’m happy enough doing it. I’ve done some dives that are 1km and an hour from the entrance. No superstitions or psyching myself up. No chance I’d get in the water with someone who felt that necessary. 

More recently I’ve started ‘dry’ caving in the Dales and really enjoy that too. Full body workout and can be quite technical with the SRT stuff.

I’d never say never to it, but some of the tight, zero vis and unstable boulder choke type cave diving going on up here doesn’t really appeal. I feel like a total amateur compared to some of the exploration uk cave dives that have been done over the last few decades. Really cutting edge in the sense that a lot of the skills were learnt by experimentation without the structure of training nowadays. Into completely virgin underwater passage. Also, a lot of this diving is solo (without a buddy/team), entirely because you can’t fit two people into the spaces involved.

As you're probably aware, cave diving in the UK was developed by cavers as a means to pass a sump, hopefully to reach unexplored dry cave beyond. I think it was some time before it became an end in itself. An early example would have been the Keld Head to West Kingsdale Mastercave link in 1978 where they knew both ends beforehand so it was the challenge of linking them together underwater. I remember following it and the YTV documentary 'Underground Eiger' available on YouTube. It was very sad when Oliver Statham committed suicide not long after. As you say, it's because of the nature of the sumps that UK cave divers are cavers who become divers rather than what seems to be the norm in the States with big, wide open sumps and good visibility. Free diving a short sump was my limit but I used to love reading about the discoveries. It was all about filling out the bigger picture. I remember years ago chatting to one of the divers pushing Malham Cove rising as he described how they'd built a scaffold cage to keep the roof from falling in while they pulled rocks out of the way. Flat out, in very poor viz, hundreds of metre in! That's keen.

I thought Wild Raving was when a sound system was dragged into Horseshoe and lots of Yooths bopped along to the latest chart hits? For years I attributed the little steel canisters to ignorant mountain bikers fixing punctures but it turns out I was wrong.

I think I read this years ago and agree it was very good. Didn't he dive down to a wrecked liner in the St Lawrence River, the Empress of something-or-other? Did it also describe a father/son team who died inside a wrecked U-boat?

Blind Descent by James M Tabor "the quest to discover the deepest place on earth" is rather American but well worth a read. Early homemade rebreathers etc.

Might be of interest - Simon Beck has started going down Mossdale again; this is from last month: youtube.com/watch?v=Hrfed3KKWsA&

In Lancashire they call it Hotpotting. 

Trail biking is just tame biking isn’t it?

I've watched quite a few of his videos. He's obviously got a connection with the cave that goes beyond the ordinary. I went in twice, back in the early nineties. My furthest in was through the Marathon crawls (where the victims of the 1967 tragedy met their end) up into the High Level Mud Caverns where they were buried a few years later. It's definitely a sobering place. As we headed out I noticed that I'd left my small bag somewhere and headed back further in to look for it. I was actually quite spooked to be on my own which I've never felt in any other cave. The sounds of the cave become more pronounced and can sound like voices. I was very glad to find my bag and then catch my friends back up. The great thing about Simon's videos is that it allows me to revisit a place I am likely to never see again.

That's the one - is it the Andrea Doria you are thinking of? It's on the shelf next to me so I could just look but guessing is more fun.

Andrea Doria rings a bell. It's a long time since I read Choudhury's book. I used to get lots of these kinds of books out of the library and memory get hazy.

A bit of googling suggests the wreck I have in mind is the Empress of Ireland which sank in relatively shallow water. I'm not sure if Choudhury features it in his book or if I'm just misremembering.