4Gas – sYnc

Hunting Morclocks in The Time Machine

“Are fish ginger?”

“No!”
“Hmmm, that must be a turd then…”

And so it came to pass that God gave Winch and me a day off, so we climbed aboard the trusty ExplorMobile and headed out into the countryside of middle England to look for Morlocks in the Time Machine…

We never did see a Morlock in the drain but we did find Mountain Bikes, Monster energy cans, big fish (including a laid back Pike who was over 2 feet long), fanny plasters, Golden Nuggets (of the turd variety) and some nice brick porn.In the 1850’s they drained the local Holme Fen which dropped the water levels locally and in 1852 they started work on the culverts to divert Bury Brook under the town, finally finishing in 1854. At the outfall Bury Brook joins High Lode which forms part of the Middle Level Navigation which eventually joins the OldRiverNene after a mile.The main reason for the trip was the actual junction of the tunnels and the remaining underground workings of the water powered town clock. The clock is still there but in 1920 was converted to run on electricity.The main tunnel carries Bury Brook (clean-ish) water and the side tunnels are stinky CSO’s. For anyone who says otherwise then don’t believe them!

If you are planning on doing the whole culvert and reaching the outfall (approx 700m) then be a smart boy like Winch was and wear Chest Waders, lazy boy here wore Thigh Waders and suffered wad0r breach halfway through, never a good thing when you are surrounded by floaters and are over 1000 meters from dry land. I poured several gallons of shitty/pissy water out each wader when we got back to the car, much to the amusement of the bemused locals who were probably wondering why two blokes were walking down the high street in 26 degree heat dressed in black rubber ;-p

I’d like to go back when there’s a LOT more water going through, the shots would be better and all the turds will have been flushed out…

Props to Dsankt, Otter & Loops for finding this place back in 2008

The ‘Money Shot’, in fact there’s two angles here cos I can’t decide which one I like the most, the first one is neat because of the water and the second one neat because of the arches.

Outfall

Looking for Morlocks…

In the Graveyard (PPE Trauma)

Reached for the4Gas the other day as we were due to snort round a CSO and it’s always a useful thing to have clipped to your shoulder strap but found it had suffered life threatening damage on the last mine trip and embarrassingly I hadn’t noticed :-/Funnily enough though it starts up and does its job properly, you just cannot see anything on the display as it’s shattered….Meh

Methinks it might be an expensive repair job though so time to get a repair estimate 🙁

Stargate

Someone once said patience is a virtue and maybe they were right, there were some wise words written in The Battle for the Soul of Man…anyway, we have been waiting for over a year to go through the Stargate and many failed attempts have cost dearly in equipment, not to mention getting sick because of the atmosphere.

I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that we would never get close to it, even after some tantalising glimpses but karma was on our side and we even managed to recover some equipment lost months ago (more on that in a future post). The Stargate was reached….and we went through…to new worlds…

Someone shooting me , shooting the Stargate

Mines #42 – Mmmmmm rich 02

Meteorological Perfection is not something you would normally associate with underground exploration but on our latest project a specific type of weather is the difference between rapid extraction, knackering 02 levels or a thoroughly enjoyable trip.

Weather Fronts were due to collide which meant a day of fantastic oxygen levels for us due to the high pressure and we enjoyed more than + 3% more 02 than had been experienced on many previous visits. Also in our favour were water levels so going chest deep got me to places I hadn’t previously been able to reach before without a boat.

Usual rules apply…No names, no locations, just pictures of somewhere. Please don’t ask for locations as refusal often offends 🙂

May have been a tub…

Reflections

Random Elsan Chemical Toilet

Water level drops of over 2ft allowed me to finally get some shots of these steel arches. I would have gone through them but wandering around in 4ft of stinking, murky water,stumbling over rocks and hidden debris with $$$ camera gear makes me twitchy…

Totally submerged tripod shot from a few weeks ago…

Same shot, same depth, this week..progress!!

Boats in here for the next stage…

Mines #41

More underground fun this week….apologies to Cold War fans (there will be something nice for you next week, watch this space….).

We avoided the water for a change and instead had to contend with knackering 02 levels, panting like a marathon runner for four hours gets a bit tedious and if that wasn’t annoying enough, false floors too!!

The false floor I would have in fact have fallen through had it not been for the discovery of something interesting just a few feet away which delayed my progress. They aren’t that rare in mines but they certainly are in this type of mine, this one was about 20ft long x 16ft wide by 10ft deep and half full of water so crashing through would have been ‘interesting’ to say the least. Other notable items included some of the most bodged ceiling supports I have seen for a long while, a case of ‘use whatever is laying around’, one of the strangest was a Cog made from what looked like snapped concrete fence posts!!

It was nice to get out to 02 rich air to be honest, but we’ll be back…

Usual rules apply…No names, no locations, just pictures of somewhere. Please don’t ask for locations as refusal often offends 🙂

In Your Arches

Poor Workmanship

False Floors and ‘floating’ brick Piers

Concrete Cogs

Texolex

Plant Room II

Don’t Touch

Sumps

Lights

Poor Workmanship Part 2

Rat Hole

Mines #38

Royal Weddings don’t really do it for me so being as far away as possible from a TV on Friday was probably a good thing. The solution was five hours underground and getting to the farthest accessible point in an abandoned mine, what we didn’t expect was to be tripping over artifacts from the 1930’s…

Usual rules apply…No names, no locations, just pictures…

Junction to knowhere

End of the line…1931

Different junction but closed in 1929

1930’s smokes…Ogden’s Guinea Gold

1930’s Choco Biscuits – Mackintosh’s Creamy Rolls

Mines #31

Not disclosing actual mine names as I believe these are sensitive locations and need preserving, also there are clear and present dangers to the casual observer, not least is the air quality in some of these mines. Human’s start going very twitchy at oxygen levels of 17% and 15% can kill you. If you wander into a heading with oxygen levels of 13% or less it is quite feasible the effect would be so rapid that you wouldn’t be able to help yourself and then its lights out….permanently. If this happens it would be sad for your family and would totally fuck things up access wise for everybody else.

I’ve been caving since the early 1990’s so being underground is nothing new. Low oxygen levels can kill you if you are not prepared…be warned.

Health & Safety lesson over, the following pictures were me messing around with long exposures and trying to perfect the art of Light Painting. Some obvious issues were encountered and lessons learned, one of which is that Xenon/Halogen light is quite bad for light painting but LED light used carefully is good, the other is that my current camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ6 only has limited settings for long exposure, namely 15, 30 or 60 seconds. These pictures are either 15 or 30 seconds, ideally I would like the option of less than 15 seconds but ultimately that means buying a DSLR at some point.

Since this visit I have invested in another torch which should help with light painting, a LED Lenser P7 which has a one handed focusing mechanism so you can switch from spot to flood. Every underground location is different though and in many places the P7 would overcook the photos but in others it would work a treat.

All of these photo’s were lit with a combination of Petzl MYO XP (85 lumens) with diffuser, Underwater Kinetics Mini Q40 (50 lumens) and a Surefire Executive Defender (60 lumens)

Dead end in a heading, unusual in that the rails should have been removed when the mine closed!