Post date: May 7, 2019 7:59:00 PM

Time: 3 hours

Team: Petie Barry, Emily Punzalan

A trip to pick up where I'd left off two weeks earlier. On this visit Emily and I walked up a bit from the main sink to see where the stream sinks. This is a point about 50m back from the cave, where the stream vanishes into a choked sink in the stream bed. Only in flood does it seem to reach the dig.

In the dig everything was where we'd left it previously. At the end of the last trip here Dáire and I had reached a bouldery hole with a draft. We didn’t have much time to check this out, so this time round I had a better poke about here. After shifting some blocks about I spotted a dark crack in the floor to one side and chucked a pebble down. It seemed to be the way to go. I set off a pair of caps to widen the entrance to this, but this simply destabilised all the boulders above it, so the next two hours was spent capping boulders left right and centre to clear out the entire area. This opened up a nice roomy working area, and eventually we could see a way down into the rift below. Emily reckoned it was squeezeable, but ended up having to get yanked out by the shoulders. Another few caps had to go off before I was able to slide down, a bit less than 2m deep in total.

What we had entered was another section of bouldery rift, this one not quite standing height, barely 4m long. Straight ahead was a load of boulders to the roof, I pulled out some of these and could look into a descending boulder-filled passage. The cave was drafting strongly inwards here. We also seem to have reached cleaner, less cherty limestone, which is a positive. Again, we’d run out of time to do any more poking here.

For this dig we were able to drag boulders back from the second dig into the boulder chamber found on the first dig. Next time we’ll have to widen out the squeeze to allow boulders to be hauled back up to the chamber. Then we can start digging downwards following the draft.

Petie