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Jamaican Caving Notes |
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Apr 6, 2004 BENTA WELL Position: WGS84 - 18 22' 24.0" N, 77 36' 21.9" W, +/- 5 m Field notes: GUY VAN RENTERGEM Cavers: G. van Rentergem, R. Stewart, M. Taylor, B. Murray, D. Roeber. April 6: The story of the pit who wasn't a pit. One day to go before we started our Troy-Windsor Trail hike. Today we wanted to save energy because we wanted to be fit for tomorrow, so we decided to do something in the region. There were rumours of a deep pit east of Coxheath, the small village where Lilly’s bar is. Hearing things like unknown deep pits gives every caver wet dreams. So today we would certainly go and search for this mistery pit and were dreaming of 100 meter deep abysses... We were five: Stef, Malibu, Brian, Dana and me. Brian and his wife never have done any rope techniques so we spent the morning training them in descending and climbing on ropes at the verandah of the Last Resort. They where both good students and at 11 o'clock the two professors handed them their diplomas. We loaded our gear in the trunk of the car plus the 50 m rope and even the 100 m rope. You never know. The trail started after Lilly's bar and was so bad Stef asked us to walk so he could save the car from the scrapheap. It was a very nice walk in the outskirts of the Cockpit Country. On the top of a hill the view was so magnificent that Stef decided to build his home there. Nearly at the end of the trail Malibu signaled Stef to stop the car. Malibu was our guide because he was the one who knew roughly the location of our goal. We put on our climbing gear, threw the ropes on our shoulders and followed him through a sugar cane field. After only 20 minutes, at the other side of the field, at the foot of a forested hill, he found the pit. Great was our suprise to see that the pit wasn't a pit. It was in fact an old circular well with a diameter of 1.9 metres. The walls of the well were lined with ingenious stacked rocks without use of cement. A rope was anchored around a tree, and with a deviation around another tree, it was hanging free into the well. I had the honour to go first. I still hoped there was a cave down there. After about a descent of 8 meters the massive rock was encountered. There are still drillmarks in the rock which proves that they blasted the well. But alas, after a decent of 21m it ended on boulders. No sign of the smallest drop of water or opening in the wall. This was indeed strange, or the people who made this well did an incredibly useless job, or the climate has changed during the last hundreds of years. Since there was no safe place in this pit against falling rocks, I climbed up again so to allow the others to "explore" this well. It took Dana some more effort to climb up again, but finally everyone of the team had set foot on the bottom of the pit. So we prepared to go back to Lilly's for some nice cool Red Stripes. I don't know how it happened, but somewhere halfway the car hit a rock with the result that the tire was flattened in a tenth of a second. And typical when you are in the middle of nowhere, the spare tire had even a bigger hole in it... Only thing to do was to bring the wheel back to civilisation and try to repair it.  Stef and I took the wheel and
started walking to Lilly's. Luckily, we found a sugar cane to put in the central hole of the wheel so carying the
damned thing became easier. But sugar cane is not so strong. So we "borrowed" a yam stick from a small
field. This was the solution. To make a long story short, we finally arived at Lilly's after a long walk. Some Red
Stripes later, Stef and the tire got a lift to Falmouth. At the same time, Brian and Dana left us. It only took 90
minutes before Stef returned. Stef, Malibu and I went back to the car with the repaired wheel. It was already dark
when we finally reached Lilly's again with the car. The day ended with Red Stripes... |
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