There are certain sports that come with a lot of kit. With caving, depending on your budget, you can just keep buying more and more stuff and although vertical kit will give you easier access to certain caves and certain parts of caves, keep in mind that “more kit =/= better caver”. If you’re a beginner, you should be with a club – caving alone with no knowledge whatsoever is ridiculously dangerous so if you’re not with a club, go and find one.
Right. You’re with a club and at the beginning, they’ll probably lend you all the kit you need but eventually you’re going to want to start buying your own. Where to start?
Obviously, this is just a guide and my opinion. If you get a good offer or your priorities work differently, by all means go ahead! But if it all looks overwhelming, these are my thoughts.
Wellies
For absolute basics, start with your own wellies. You want a pair that you know fits comfortably, that you know has good grip and that you know no one else’s sweaty feet have been in. Don’t buy the fashion ones, the pretty plastic ones. The proper farmer-style rubber ones have grip like nothing else. They’ll be more expensive than the pretty ones but they’ll last forever and you can trust them not to slip. The recommended ones in my day were Dunlop Suretreads which I don’t think are made anymore. They were good rubber, with good grip and that ribbing offered extra protection in places your feet were likely to get bashed. I might go for these industrial Dunlops if I was buying new serious caving boots. These days, your best bet is probably your local agricultural/farm shop or somewhere like B&Q. Don’t get lined – imagine that lining being soaked in muddy water. It’s going to take forever to dry and it’ll always be revolting. And 100% do not buy Hunters, not for caving. Oh, and make sure your name is in them in Sharpie because in a caving changing room, one pair of muddy green wellies looks much like another, and overwrite it before your next trip when your boots have dried because that Sharpie name will fade.
Undersuit
For specialist kit, I’d start with your own undersuit. You’ve probably just been caving in your own old clothes and an undersuit will transform your caving experience. I don’t know if fashions have changed but in my day, undersuits were fleece onesies – a better quality fleece than your average high street onesie, probably with a tougher zip and sometimes with extra-long two-way zips for comfort, especially men’s, if you see what I mean. Fleece dries quickly, it’s soft and because it’s one piece, you won’t get any cold bits in the middle where your top and bottom halves have ridden up and down. I understand undersuits – or furries or fuzzies, which we often called them too – now come in all sorts of colours and patterns. I’m still delighted with my new red one – oh, the fun of having a bright colour! In my days, all the boys had navy ones and I managed a bottle green one and I think some people bought new grey ones in my final year, so red was quite the novelty. That said, my green one had two layers of fleece on the knees for comfort and it’s only just dawned on me that my red one doesn’t.
Neoprene socks
You may have noticed that whatever fabric socks you’re wearing in your wellies, they get wet and scrunch up and they’re cold and uncomfortable and you can never use them above ground again. Enter neoprene socks! Mine are ankle-length but some of my clubmates preferred the half-calf length – it depends what you prefer and how much neoprene you feel like wrestling with. Don’t go for the sailing/surfing style with a solid sole and zips – you want them to be sleek and lightweight and with nothing to rub or get in the way. They’ll revolutionise your caving trips and they’re well worth investing in early in your caving journey.
Light
I went for helmet and light in one – my club was trying to dispose of a helmet that had never fitted anyone else and they also adapted an old FX2 unit to a headlamp simply to get rid of obsolete lights, so that all came very cheap and easy. If that hadn’t happened and I had to pick one, I’d go for the light first. I’m fifteen years behind on caving light technology so I have no idea what to buy but my experience since I graduated is that headlights are a lot smaller, a lot lighter, a lot brighter and have much better battery life. On the other hand, I don’t know if there’s anything out there as bomb-proof as the old Speleotechnics stuff but when I’ve used mine alongside other cavers, it’s like using a stuttering candle compared to having the sun trapped in a lamp. I believe Petzl do a range of headtorches they recommend for caving? Anyway, when you’re so dependent on light, I’d feel much more comfortable knowing I have my own light and I know it’s been fully charged because I’m the one who charged it yesterday and that my lighting is completely within my own control.
Oversuit
I think this is the point where I’d invest in my own oversuit. Club ones get a lot of use and a lot of abuse. They have tears, seams wear out, zips get clogged up with mud and did it get properly washed and dried by the last user? No idea. The standard for caving oversuits is Warmbac – an all-in-one cordura suit, hopefully with both an inside chest pocket and a sleeve pocket (useful for surveys and Mars bars respectively). I’m afraid they won’t last you a lifetime. Caving is inherently tough on clothing, even clothing designed to cave in, and eventually something will wear out or tear. I have a guide to how I fixed a tear in my own suit here, if that helps with maintenance. After every use, wash it with a hose and a rough brush like a broom, probably spread out on the floor. Don’t pressure wash – it’ll look clean but that cave mud is full of tiny rock crystals and you’re pushing them through the fabric, making more tiny micro-tears with every wash. Keep doing that and eventually your suit will just fall apart. Use the broom to brush the tight-woven fabric like you’re brushing your teeth, brushing the mud out of the tiny grooves. Do it every time it’s used and make sure it dries properly. Caving suits are too expensive to accidentally leave to go mouldy because you forgot to dry them.
Oh – you’ll need to go and try this on. Caving suit sizes are crazy. Do you want a Small or a Small+? How does a Small+ differ from a Medium? What’s a Medium+? I guess it allows a wider range of sizing to get precisely the right one but it’s not intuitive at all if you want to order online. And remember, you’ll probably be wearing something reasonably bulky underneath, so leave room for that.
Helmet
I think now this is the last piece of basic essential equipment. Don’t buy your helmet second-hand – this is PPE and invisible damage to it from a previous user can put your brain in danger. Make sure your light can be attached – the old Speleotechnics lamps needed hooks for the lamp and battery and clips to hold the wire in place and I don’t know if that’s an issue with the new lightweight headlamps but it’s going to be really inconvenient if you can’t attach your light to your hat. Get the lightest you can. Mine is fibreglass and it weighs a ton. It also sticks out a good inch, maybe an inch and half, around my head which means it doesn’t fit through particularly narrow places. We used to keep silver blankets and Mars bars in the top of the helmet but in hindsight, that seems to compromise the suspension and the safety so keep those for your pockets.
Other stuff
That’s the essentials. Of course, there’s so much more to buy if you want, and most of these are very much if you want. I’ll do a quick rundown of what else is available.
Kneepads/elbow pads
Kneepads are the best. I so strongly recommend kneepads. The yellow rubbery kind give you more grip than the plain black kind, which is what I have. Get the ones without the adjustable straps – those buckles and fastenings will be the first thing in your kit to break so the slip-on kind will last much longer. I’m not a fan of elbow pads myself; I find them restrictive and I never dented my elbows too badly.
Storage bag
I don’t know what I kept my kit in. I rolled my suits together and tied them with my belt and then threaded my helmet and light through but did I carry my kneepads, wellies & cuffs separately? The traditional storage bag for transporting wet caving kit is a “Bernie’s bag”. I don’t think Bernie’s Cave Shop still exists but they used to sell a heavy-duty plastic bag, about the size of an orange survival bag but even thicker, which people generally used to throw their kit in. Keeps it together, keeps the minibus seats dry. You don’t want anything more technical than that. If you can’t find an industrial strength plastic-bag, an Ikea bag’s a pretty good substitute, although suits fit better in it if you roll them up.
Neoprene cuffs
Now, this was something no one recommended! Some non-Warmbac oversuits come without the neoprene cuffs that help seal the sleeves so some of the caving shops used to sell separate ones. The built-in ones are about the same size as the ribbed cuffs you get on sweatshirts but the separate ones are like little neoprene gauntlets and cover most of your forearm. That’s where I tended to get bruised so I invested in a set of neoprene cuffs which I wore over my undersuit – the oversuit was just too bulky to fit them over and anyway, it had its own cuffs. I never saw anyone else using these things and that’s a shame because I thought they were really useful.
Belt
We used to use belts to hold our headlamp batteries and then we carried on using them even after belt batteries became obsolete. They’re good for holding your oversuit in place and they’re also good for belaying. Of course, officially they’re battery belts and they’re absolutely not belay belts because they’ll slip right up under your armpits and possibly beyond and they don’t fasten as securely as a harness and all in all, don’t use them for belaying. You would never do actually ropework on a belt but they’re good for ladders and the sort of climbs where you’re using the rope as a backup or security rather than actually depending on it taking your weight. Come on, no one’s going to take a harness into Swildon’s for the 20, you’re going to do that on a belt. I personally like the roller buckles but I admit that they’re bulky. Everyone else in my club, when buying their own belt, went for the double d-rings. Hey, apart from anything else, it made mine easy to pick out of a heap!
SRT kit
This is the most expensive thing you’ll ever buy in caving. Seat harness, chest harness, chest jammer, hand jammer, descender, cowstails and krabs to put on them, plus the various bits and pieces to hold everything together plus the little bag to keep the whole lot together. See mine in its own dedicated post here. Worth it if you’re planning to do lots of ropework, obviously. I did lots of practice in the woods and in sports centres and on bridges but I only used it underground… twice? This is another thing you can expand endlessly. One of my clubmates had a foot jammer, which mostly just got in the way and there’s always spares and alternatives you can throw in there. Bear in mind you’re going to have to either carry this through the cave to the pitch or actually cave in it so you don’t want it to be too heavy.
Emergency equipment
You should have a load of group kit, including a first aid kit and extra lights, which should live in a waterproof container. It’s still worth having your own stuff. Start with that silver blanket I mentioned – it’s about the size of your palm and can live quite happily in your pocket. A spare light – we all had small headtorches of the Petzl Tikka type which we wore around our necks, and it’s also not a bad idea to have a whistle, although bear in mind it’ll be wet and muddy when you finally want to put it in your mouth.
PVC suit
For cold caves or for digging, you can get a PVC suit, which is usually bright yellow and rubbery. They’re pretty much for keeping you warm in conditions where the temperature is either colder than usual or you’re not moving around much. UK caves don’t really require PVC suits so realistically, you’ll probably only want one if you’re going to dig. However, if you get to the point where you need a PVC suit, you’re also at the point where you’re beyond reading someone’s blog to find out about the kit you need
Wetsuit
Wet caves can be much pleasanter in a wetsuit, although bear in mind that you’ll roast half to death and your movement will be restricted in a dry cave. A shortie wetsuit is often a better call, with something underneath to keep your arms and legs protected. I bought mine from Asda. I also had a thin neoprene rash vest, which seemed quite a good compromise, although all the ones I’ve seen in the last ten years have been the same fabric as a swimsuit, which won’t do the job in a cave, although it might not be a terrible thing to wear as caving underwear, which is a subject I’m otherwise leaving alone. Your third neoprene option is a specialist caving garment known as a neofleece, which is basically a shortie wetsuit with heavy-duty fleece arms and legs attached, which is probably a lot more practical than a shortie wetsuit over your undersuit, but also more expensive.
Gloves
I’ve left this one to last because I don’t like gloves myself. I think this is one where you have to experiment. A pair of fingerless sailing gloves are quite good for SRT. Neoprene gloves are quite good for wet caves. Some people like ordinary washing-up gloves but you’ll probably find in caving conditions they become quite single-use. Most people prefer long rubbery gloves – I had a clubmate who wore them and referred to them by a name I won’t use on this blog but refers to the fact that a vet might wear them when attending a farm. My problem with gloves is that while they often stick well to caves, your hands don’t necessarily stick to the insides. Also, they’re supposed to keep your hands clean and dry and comfortable but I guarantee they’ll fill up with grit, mud and water and you can’t even wipe it off without rinsing out the gloves in the sort of clean water you just don’t find in caves.
Rope
Oh, now you’re getting beyond kit. Rope is always the first non-personal-kit people feel an urge to buy. Try to resist it. Rope is heavy and it’s something that should belong to your club, where group funds can stretch to different styles and lengths depending on what you need it for. What diameter do you want? What length do you want? Dynamic or static? I can talk forever about rope so I might save that for another post. If you’re desperate for a bit of rope to use as your personal handline, short cut-off lengths of an old club rope are a far better idea. Or a sling. Slings aren’t a bad idea.
Karabiners
Cavers love karabiners. Get the right shape, style and material for your needs. The lightweight aluminium ones are great for storing gear and can be used for climbing in an emergency. A big heavy iron HMS is good for lifelining. Snapgates are just generally fun but go for screwgate if you want to be sure they’re not going to open unless you really want them to – and in a cave, those screws are going to get full of mud and grit so you’re going to have to really want them to open.
Books
Cavers are nerds, as a general rule, and there’s nothing more nerdy than a handbook for your extreme sport. I think if you’re interested in learning more about caving than what you’re told while underground – or if you’ve forgotten everything because it’s not optimum learning conditions – getting a book is a good idea. The one I had recommended was Alpine Caving Techniques. It’s big, it covers stuff we don’t do in the UK and it’s quite intimidating for a beginner. The book that’s more approachable for beginners is Andy Sparrow’s Complete Caving Manual, which I own but only bought fairly recently and have never devoured in the way I did Alpine Caving Techniques. Both are good in their own way. (Those links are affiliate links to bookshop.org, which means I get a few pennies and you’re helping fund local bookshops and not a penny is going to Jeff Bezos and his mates.)
Is that it? Oh, of course not. But that’s everything you’re going to think about for the first year or so and once you get beyond that, you won’t need me to recommend anything. Good luck and have fun!