Kit check

If you want to lift a casualty in a stretcher out of some multi-pitch venue, you had better have a lot of kit to do that with. And if you have a lot of kit, it also helps if you know what you have, where you have it, and what shape it is in. So from time to time we as North Wales Cave Rescue need to do a kit check. And that time had come! And I had decided to show my good intentions and go there.

It was a bit of a pity that it took place on a day with blazing sunshine in Bethesda. It would have been such an amazing day to go into the hills! But that's life. I got into my car and drove east. It was a ~75 minute drive, and I soon drove into very scenic mist. And later the mist got thicker and less scenic. And then I got to my destination. I put on my mask and walked in. We were in an old school that had been turned into a community centre. Some six blokes were already working! I didn't feel bad about popping in bit later because of the long drive. One of these men lived barely 2 minutes away.

Dewi, the chairman, had a big stack of kit checking forms, and suggest I start working on the hauling bags. That was fine with me! We had the old forms, so we knew what should be in there. And every bag had its own colour of cable ties with which all the kit was marked. So I started, together with Tom, our kit officer. I basically did an inventory, and Tom made a note of everything that needed to be added to the bag. This was mainly short bits of rope; we retire rope (and other textile-based things such as slings) after 10 years. And we indeed needed to retire quite a lot of it! And we had a 200 m length of new rope, so we could cut off bits of the desired length.

The first bag took us a while. The second one was a lot quicker! And then we were on a roll. We did take a coffee break; I was glad about that. Not only do I like coffee; it was also absolutely freezing in there. For reasons of covid we had the door wide open, and some windows too. I don't think there was any heating on. It would have been foolishness as the heat would just dissipate outside. And I was sitting on the cold floor. I did make sure I sat on every hauling bag I took an inventory of, but they're not made for thermal insulation.

There was some distraction as well when Tom's wife and their dog popped by. It was a very charming dog, and a lot of us seem to quite like dogs! But otherwise we just worked on. At some point I ate some sandwiches and then I moved on to rigging bags. These are a bit dull! Hauling bags have all sorts of belay devices and pulleys and jammers and whatnot in, but rigging bags are mainly carabiners and slings. The good thing is that they are smaller, so I moved to a table so I could sit on a chair and not on the cold floor. And behind me, all sorts of other work seemed to be progressing well.

When I was done with the rigging bags it looked like we were wrapping up. And I was cold. And I still had quite a drive ahead of me. So I asked Dewi if it was okay if I would leave. And it was. That did involve some faff, as both Tom and his wife were blocking me in, and the building also had a bit of a tricky driveway. I got away in the end. I was a bit sad that it had been an absolutely glorious day in Bethesda, and I had been cold all day in a very misty village near Llangollen, but that's life sometimes. I knew there were some tourist attractions nearby: a ruined abbey I had driven past on the way up, and the Pontcysyllte aqueduct a stone's throw further east. But I decided to skip them. I wanted to become comfortable now! And that would work out. So altogether worth it; I hadn't actually done much with cave rescue recently, and now I have made a bit of a contribution after all. And I would get comfortable before I got home…