Water Icicle Close Cavern

Karen was in Rugby visiting friends and Keith asked if I could help him and Pete with moving gear to the bottom of The Elevator for their digging project.
I met the two of them at the Orpheus cottage then after picking up some gear and breakfast at the café in Monyash, we headed underground at around 11:00.
We had quite a pile of gear to transport: around 15 scaffold poles, three tackle bags with scaffold clips (very heavy!), a tackle bag with tools, drill batteries, another with the drill and angle grinder, a section of bicycle and metal stand (!), a hand winch on a short scaffold pole and an old fishing umbrella.
We transported the gear to the bottom of the shaft then to each obstacle and eventually, to Three Way Aven.
We then dropped down The Elevator – my first time since I usually either left my SRT kit at the bottom of the entrance shaft on previous trips, or there were a lot of people around and the bottom of The Elevator wasn't a good place to be.
The Elevator starts as a short drop of around 8 metres to a small chamber with a bouldery floor (most of which used to block The Elevator at the level of the main passage. From here a Y hang leads through a slot into a rift then down about 12 metres to a surprisingly large long chamber.
This chamber had a lot of fractured rock and again, the floor is composed of small rocks and boulders. From there, there is a further drop of maybe 5 metres to a vertical water-worn tube with fluting of under two metres in diameter. This is where the ongoing dig is at present.
At the top of this final drop, Keith and Pete set up a scaffold pole horizontally and then bolted it to the walls, wherever they could find somewhere with not many fractures. This was to assist in hauling up dig spoil.
The short scaffold pole with the hand winch attached at on end was then attached to the horizontal tube.
Now the different bit. In between dropping the spanner, the bicycle chain and nearly, the fishing umbrella, Keith attach yet another short scaffold pole to the one with the hand winch, and then attached the “X” shaped metal stand to that. Attached to the stand was the section of bicycle frame with seat and rear section including crank and rear axle and dérailleur. From the dérailleur, Keith attached a section of cycle chain running from the gears with the dérailleur to a chainwheel bolte to the hand winch crank.
The plan was that Pete could take up position down at the dig site while Keith sits on the bike frame pedalling to winch up the bucket of spoil and then he could empty the bucket and return it down to Pete for the next load.
And the old fishing umbrella? That's to shelter Keith from the large number of drips which happen to fall at the top of the pitch!
Eventually I, being first up, reached the surface at around 18:45, and immediately crossed to my car to phone Karen, who I knew would be getting concerned about the time.
After I had got changed, as the other two arrived after re-ascending the entrance shaft,we arranged to meet in the Miners Standard in Winster, so I headed home for a quick shower and then, joined by Karen, we walked up West Bank to the pub.