Post date: Mar 25, 2018 8:29:04 PM

Cavers: Stephen McCullagh (Bus), Stephen Macnamara (Muh), Claire Dunphy, Aileen Brown, Roisín Lindsay, Tony Furnell. 4 hours.

Digging/dig investigation trip, the day after Jock and Lisa's wedding. Almost in attendance were Rocky and Emi, but they were still looking comfortable in the car(-a-van) when we left Rossharbour.

The preceding days were very wet; the Lagan was flooded at Lisburn and there was lots of rain in Fermanagh, so we expected the cave to be tanking. In the end, the entrance waterfall was pretty normal, as was the level of the stream at the bottom. Muh rigged, using Aileen's spare chest strap for one of the deviations in the absence of a sling.

It was my first time descending the dry second pot down to the streamway, the destination on my last trip (in 2009!) having been the sandy dig accessed below the wet pot. We traipsed downstream to the sump which, as Muh previously reported, isn't very obvious as the water just seems to undercut a rockface where most of the flow is lost. An inlet enters here from the right, which helps to confuse things a little. It emerges from a choked passage, which is of the same proportions as the preceding main streamway. Bus theorised that this is not actually an enormous passage related to the inlet, but is instead the old continuation of the main streamway, which has since collapsed, leading the main stream to undercut the left rock face. The collapse has lots of calcite formed at various different times both in and on it, as well as buried in the silt. Bus squeezed some way up the inlet tube on the right, and decided that the inlet flow was probably too small to have created such a large passage; the possibility being that the main stream simply emerges again on the far side of the collapse, rather than disappearing forever into bedding plane.

A very small overflow from the main stream (and some water from the inlet) enters the blind passage, low on the left side, and descends into a too-tight wet grovel with a scalloped ceiling and a gravel floor.

(*SMuh: was this the horizontal tube referred to in your previous report, or was that the inlet tube?)

Within 20m a long puddle is seen and the ceiling appears to level out, as if it might ascend again on the far side. However, a healthy layer of foam coated the visible end of the passage, so it's difficult to say whether a way exists. The floor is gravel and fairly easily diggable, so we made a start with crowbars. I lowered and widened the start of the crawl, while the others dammed up the beginning of it and dug down into the adjacent mud bank to make an easier entrance.

By the end we'd made a good start to the dig, although Stevebus wasn't completely enthused. If the right materials were easier to obtain, he would have preferred to blast through the boulder choke in gung-ho American style. In the absence of this, the following would be useful on the next trip:

• Spoil bucket and a rope

• Lino (for the softies)

• 20+metre hose to set up a siphon and wash through the (copious amounts of) silt in between trips. With the removal of the easily-diggable gravel, the silt left behind was already becoming claggy by the end of this trip.

A 2- or 3-man team would make fairly quick headway here to see whether the tube is on its way to something worthwhile.

After a couple of hours and swapping hands, we made our way back up. The extent to which my cave fitness has dropped was revealed to me going back up the pitches... Also, the amount of rope rub! The hang from deviations is very good, but care must be taken when passing them on the way out.

Tony