Post date: Jul 30, 2009 12:13:02 PM

Divers: Gaelan Eliffe, Eoghan Mullan, Adam Ratyn, Artur Kozlowski

On Saturday the 25th of July (a day before my ordeal in Aghinrawn) the strong team of four went down the Prod’s Pot. We carried a set of diving tanks (7l and 2l), harness with 3.5kg of lead, reel with 80m of line, set of fins and 4 masks. All party wore wetsuits.

Our goal was to investigate the second sump in Formation Passage which I believed at the time hadn't been dived before. Only after the trip I discovered that it had been dived by Solari and Elliot but found to be too tight.

The other reason I was interested in it was the fact that the water issuing from Formation Passage was dye traced from many surprising and remote places. It just got stuck in my head and I needed to check it out . If there was nothing there then at least I could tick it off the list.

To get down to the bottom of the Prod’s Pod we had to abseil 5 pitches, some of them quite tight. Together with rigging by lads, it took us more than 2h and this is the material for another story …

After some confusion and problems with route-finding (finally sorted out by Eoghan) we reached the first sump in Formation Passage. I dived it with single 7l cylinder and it was 1.5 deep and 3.5m long. The flow from the upstream was quite strong which was making it tricky to pass without diving gear. Not to discourage the rest of the team whom frankly speaking I still needed to reach the second sump I returned and said that the sump was a piss , no more than 2m long. I repaired broken dive line so they could use it as a guide and pull themselves along. Then I grabbed all the bags and disappeared in the sump trying to keep up the impression that it was so easy that there was nothing more to talk about. But of course I was worried a little bit. They all made it apparently enjoying it ( or they were good actors...). It was challenging without a diving gear, fair play to them.

From there we forced two very low ducks and entered walking size streamway with fine boulder cascade. I really enjoyed rock formations in that section of the passage. In dimmed lights of the torches the arches of the roof and the walls looked surreal and I felt if I was in some dark Gothic cathedral. Also there and just above the cascade there were some huge boulders wedged between the walls and defying the law of gravity high above our heads. It seemed to me that just above them there was some big high level passage but to climb there would require some balls…maybe other time...

Last 50m before the second sump was a crawl in the streamway under some extremely fine stalactite formations.

At the first the Sump 2 looked very promising - the underwater passage was descending along fine gravel bottom. Unfortunately it was too low to enter, the clearance between the roof and the bottom being only 25cm. However

it turned out to be extremely easy dig since the gravel, once disturbed, was carried away by the flow out of the sump. After 15 min of digging or so the progress of some 4m was made and the passage was seen to continue descending. There was no time for any lengthy excavations though – to get there took us more time than we had expected and we needed to hurry to get out before the callout.

It would be good to come back there having some more time ( I might need some other sherpas though as I overheard some of the team members vowing not to carry any cylinders down the Prod’s ever, ever again…)

The way out through the pitches was very arduous and slow and some of us got stuck there for a good while

But I do really enjoy that, it was excellent educating and versatile trip : difficult tight pitches, use of SRT, heavy gear transportation, sump free and scuba diving , ducks, cascades, formations, underwater digging…Some 7h underground.

Many, many thanks to the lads for helping with the diving gear. I didn’t really have the chance to say that properly to them.

cheers

Artur