Ralf and I went to Torhola on Sunday to draw a map. We made some progress in that, but oh boy, there are so many problems, question marks, and on top of that, it is a lot of work in cold damp place!
It was fun to be in Torhola for an entire day though, with a steady stream of tourists coming to visit the cave. Oddly, most of them turned around at the cave entrance, no flash light, seems too difficult. And two odd guys with helmets and weird equipment! Even if we tried to say you can visit, gave them lamps, explained the cave, and gave some even a bit of tour. The small kids were the most interested in hearing about the cave and most daring to explore though.
The problems had to do with the fact that I had not calibrated my cave measurement device before, and trying to do it before this trip, I run into problems. Not sure if my technique is wrong somehow, or if the device has an issue. After calibration it claims decent accuracy, but the size of compass error is 10x what it should be. Maybe I made a mistake in assembling the device, forging a metal screw somewhere, or bent the mother board, or something?
It is also surprisingly difficult to use the modern smartphone-based software applications for caving. A big part of the problem is that I have no experience in using them, and without someone showing the proper technique by hand, the manuals are not really explaining how to do some of the things I wanted to do. For instance, it is difficult to correct information that the application determined based on measurements, such as what type of a measure a particular data point is. The flow in the applications is easiest when surveying long continues tunnels, but not at all intuitive when the cave branches in many directions all the time.
More about the map later.
Photo (c) 2017 by Jari Arkko, drawing by Ralf Strandell. All rights reserved.
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