Sean, Alison, Macca, Dave, Gordon, Jane, Jon Gilson, Mike and his partner Mandy set off to tackle the second highest of the Yorkshire 3 Peaks, Ingleborough (724 metres). The forecast was good and the morning lived up to expectations as we awoke to bright sunshine.
Hi-tech Macca finally had the opportunity to test his new Satnav system so off we went.
The route was to take us past Ingleborough Caves, through Trow Gill and onto the open moor of Ingleborough's south-west slopes. Luckily there was no chance of losing our way as Macca supplied us with copious statistics at every opportunity.
'Macca calling normal people, Macca calling normal people, we have walked 1.3 miles and climbed 769.3 ft at a rate of 2.83 miles per hour, over and out'
As we hit the open moor and walked towards the abyss of Gaping Gill the skies to the east turned rather dark and the summit of Ingleborough was beginning to cloud over.
After a quick stop at Gaping Gill the rain started and so we all donned our waterproofs just as the steady ascent to the south top of Ingleborough began. Would the cloud clear in time for our historic summit landing?
No! We reached the cloud sodden summit shelter and ate lunch.
Jon, Buzz, Alison and Mandy approaching the summit of Ingleborough. Jon is loving every minute of it.
Lunch eaten and time to go. It was decided to retrace our steps to the south-west fringe of the summit and turn left to hit the Horton-in-Ribblesdale path but a minor deviation meant that we unwittingly hit the north-west fringe. Time for Macca to save the day!
Macca confirmed that we weren't where we wanted to be so Sean heroically saved the day by using his compass to get us going in the right direction.
We began our descent and constantly checked for the path that would see us back to Clapham. The path finally appeared, rather later than expected, but we marched on knowing that Buzz would keep us in check with his technological 'tour de force'.
The path wasn't as clear as the 1:50000 map made out so there were a couple of moments of confusion as faint grassy paths led of in various directions. Sean and Jon walked ahead to maintain a sense of direction but then Buzz marched off in another direction and shouted Sean and Jon back.
'Hhhhmm' thinks Sean and Jon, 'this can't be right?'. Buzz checked the 'contraption' and confirmed that, according to him, we were now heading in the right direction. Sean decided to double check Buzz's findings and grabbed the device off the mad space captain.
As we expected, Buzz was sending us up his Uranus. We headed back on our original course whilst Buzz puzzled over what had gone wrong.
We eventually reached Cape Clapham and enjoyed a few pinties of the fantastic Skipton Brewery Golden Pippin (the same ale that saved our lives in Cowgill on the Dales Way).
The night continued in familiar fashion. Food was eaten, drink was drunk and Buzz was even offered the chance to dock with another vessel. He turned down the docking opportunity as he felt his docking adapter would have been too small for the recipients O ring (which would also have been badly damaged after multiple previous docking manoeuvres).
Anyway, that was it. An enjoyable weekend was had by all.