Team: Petie Barry, Paul McCarron.
Aim: Finish surveying cave; Seek relief from punishing heat.
Time: About 4.5 hours plus 2.5 in Pollasillagh.
Festeringly hot as Paul and I walked from the Hoo down to Poll’rees. This was my first proper caving trip since the Gorteen exped, and the first time in Poll’rees in over a year and a half. After calibrating the Distox we wrapped up some odds and ends downstream - we surveyed down Sheep Dip passage, then added a leg to the end into the final sump chamber. After this we packed up and made for the far end of the cave, close to Cat’s Hole, where the plan was to survey the passages linking to Kevin’s Hole and the Basement Streamway. This meant much surveying through torturous boulder crawls, but we finally reached the streamway, flowing ink-black around the beach at the foot of Kevin’s Hole. Then we backed up, returned to Specialist’s Chamber, where we dropped down the sandy funnels into the Basement Streamway once more. Here we slid into the warm water and headed downstream.
On my last visit here, a solo trip around 2010, this met a sump quite quickly, within about 5m. Today though, following the long spell of hot weather, there was about 15m of low, wide canal, ending in a very low duck, beyond which water could be heard running. After surveying up to the duck I decided to have a crack at it. For about 2m the clearance between the roof and the water was about 10cm, but the final metre was down to about 3/4cm. Floating along on my back, I felt my way through, using my hands to sense where the airspace was highest. With about half a metre to go I could feel my legs ahead of me in open space, and submerged my head and pulled myself through. I was in a small bouldery chamber, with the stream flowing off between large boulders. Initially I though I had broken through to where the stream appears at the foot of the entrance slope and headed off to see if I’d pop out into the streamway where we’d been two hours earlier. But as I went through the boulders it was clear that I was in new cave, the missing section of streamway between the Basement Streamway downstream sump, and where the stream re-emerges from a boulderchoke below the entrance slope. As expected, my romp through virgin passage wasn’t very long-lived, as after about 15m of scrambling between boulders the passage choked up. Heading back upstream I found a decent-sized chamber, about 6m across and 7m high, that I’d failed to notice on the way down.
Back at the sump I had to head back through as Paul didn’t fancy getting an ear infection by letting the river water have a good soak around his ear-drums. The return was more difficult as there wasn’t anywhere convenient to duck through to, and it was also difficult to navigate the narrow channel where the air-gap was largest, so I crept along the ceiling, chin scraping against the rock, with Paul giving me directions as to where I needed to move my head to get the tastiest bits of oxygen. Once through we wrapped up the surveying in this area by heading upstream to the upstream sump. This done we headed back to the entrance and did the final bit of surveying through the entrance climb to the surface.
So a small but significant little extension to Pollthanarees. Barely 30m of passage, but it’s not every day you find a new section of the Sruth Coppa streamway. The duck has almost certainly closed up again, with this weeks rain, so god knows when anyone else will get through again. The survex file for Pollthanarees comes in at 506m, including Al’s 15m dive in the terminal sump, that makes 520m of passageway.
Paul and I rounded out the day by surveying Pollasillagh from the main Pollasillagh entrance down to the Terminal Sump, bringing that cave up to 472m of passage. There’s now 1345m of passage surveyed in the Sruth Coppa Caves. 'Only' John Thomas left to add to the map.
Petie