Dear All,
Apologies for seeming to have neglected my duties of expedition organiser, but I have been (and still am) up to my eyes in work. The night shift is not the ideal way to sort anything out. All being well, I'm hoping to have this contract finally finished in a couple of weeks.
It's looking as though we're aiming to head out to Austria over the weekend of July 28th, with a view to returning to the UK for Monday August 13th. This will allow one weekend in which to combine with the Austrian cavers for the Hirlatz camp. It may prove necessary for an advance party to arrive earlier so that we can locate some of the caves; we'll have to meet up with the locals for this, and they tend to work during the week! Any volunteers for this task should let me know.
In the near future I'm going to have to start getting dosh off people to confirm their place. See no reason to change the policy of £40 per person. Will have to sort out an account when I get a chance. Again, any volunteers would be welcome. In fact, who wants to be Treasurer? Not sure if students can be trusted, though: too tempting to spend the money on beer or diving gear!
I still don't know precisely who is coming on this trip. Will you all do me a favour and confirm? If you know anyone else who might want to come then tell them to get in touch with me. As most of you should be aware, this expedition has got some reasonably hard-core objectives, and the cavers intent upon pushing these have obviously got to be up to it. However, we've also got any number of less technical or difficult sites to explore, so there is absolutely no reason why inexperienced cavers should not be welcome. Please don't try to put others off just because they haven't done a great deal. After all, they could be the Dachstein crew of the future! Us duffers need to nurture the nippers!
With the best will in the world, I'd planned on making sure that everyone was up to a minimum standard with SRT, ladder and line techniques etc, and that enough people were up to scratch on emergency techniques to make sure we all had a reasonable chance of survival! Unfortunately, time and circumstances have not allowed that to date, so may I suggest that whoever needs help in these areas get off their arses and ask some of the others? There's some sort of Andy Spacker workshop in the Mendips soon, so get going, gang. Between now and August, some of you might want to consider doing a Daren camp to prepare you for what awaits (and if you go down there let me know, as there's a little something that I'd like bringing out....!).
Anyway, enough of that now. I've got very few e-mail addresses for potential expedition members, so please forward this to anyone else.
Cheers,
Joel.