Post date: Jun 9, 2019 10:40:27 PM

Team: Petie Barry, Hugh Norton, Dáire O'Carroll

Time: 4 hours

The third session. A late evening trip, we only arrived at the Noon's parking spot at 9:30pm. First up was a bit of housekeeping - Dáire and Hugh shifted boulders from the first chamber through the first wriggle and into the entrance rift. Meanwhile, I capped a few boulders left above the squeeze from the last trip here. Unfortunately I dropped the cleaning rod from my capping kit - this vanished down the squeeze and was swallowed up by the boulders below.

Once the tidying up was out of the way I dropped down through the squeeze for a further look. The draft was still following the wall down, a bit off to the side, and looked to be the way to go, but I could see black shadows straight down below the squeeze, and a floor of some form about 2m down. It looked appealing and much easier to reach, but had no draft. So I turned to the opposite wall and followed the draft first. The first few caps made a nice hole, but this seemed to be causing some instability in the surrounding boulders, and wasn't the easiest direction to work in. Hugh went down for a look, and was lucky to dodge a large block which peeled off the wall. I went back down and started to cap this block out of existence, which I did about 7 caps later. This made it much easier to see down into the black shadows, and suggested that they don't amount to much. No sign of my cleaning rod down there either. The best way on seems to be following the draft, which will require quite a bit more boulders to be shifted. At least with Hugh's block out of the way there's a nice bit of room to work with down there. Exited at two in the morning.

- Petie