AVALON, YEAR BY YEAR
How it all began...
By clicking at the left, you can enter a
page for every year that we exist. It gives a short
overview of the highlights of that year and some historical or
funny pictures. A must! (English translation in
progress!)
In the beginning... there was Speleoclub AVERNUS
Antwerpen, founded in November 1983. This club grew quickly and
soon our first "French" caving trip took place in the
"Doubs". The skills and ambition grew in a rather
spectacular way; unfortunately not at the same pace for
everybody. Several disputes about this fact, and also about
"how a club should function in a democratic way" (which
wasn't the case...), lead to a rupture between the young wolves
(us, 17 men strong) and the old guys (5 men) and in February 1986
the old guys decided to leave the club.
SC AVERNUS continued as before, soon counted 25 members, and
was more ambitious than ever. In July 1986 we took part in an
interclub-expedition that brought us at -705m in the Gouffre
Berger.
But a very annoying fact was that the old cavers who had left our
club, had founded a new club that they had named (how original!)
AVERNUS VZW. They profited from our good reputation and to solve
this confusing situation for once and for all, we decided to
change the name of our club...
And then there was... SC AVALON (May 1987).
Inspired by Roxy Music's song "Avalon", that we heard
in the car, while we were heading towards the South of France for
another caving week...
AVALON comes from the Greek and/or English mythology and means:
the paradise, the place where heroes came to die. The tales say
it is an island, where the great King Arthur died after his last
battle..
Our club flourished as never before and we bottomed one big
cave after another: (Pierre-St.Martin, Gouffre Berger, Verneau,
Badalona, Aphanic? Lonn?Peyret...). In Belgium a small but
quickly growing number of members felt the urge to discover
something of our own and we started digging as maniacs, every
weekend. But real results didn't show up, until the day in 1988
when we found some 100 m of new passages in the tourist cave of
Neptune (Petigny). Ever since that day, we made one discovery
after another and soon became one of Belgium's leading clubs in
that domain. In hardly 10 years time, we found over 10000 m of
new passages. Those who are familiar with digging and exploring
in Belgium, will surely realize the importance of this figure...
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