New shirt

A blog post on a garment! That must be a special one. And it is. One of the local cavers has turned his hobby commercial, and sells caving kit online. And he also sells caving T-shirts. Self-designed, as far as I know. After the last training he brought in a whole bag of these, and sold well. And my favourite has the picture below:

Everyone will recognise the skull with the caving helmet. Not everybody will recognise what would normally be the cross-bones: they're two stops! Or descenders. The devices we use for abseiling down a rope. They're called "stops" because the idea is that they only feed to rope through if you push the handles that can be seen on top. If you let go, they stop. One hopes, at least.

If you go up a rope, you have at least two points where you are fixed to it. If you go down you have only one... so they're all that stands between you and death! I love this shirt. Might not wear it while visiting my mother, though...