Post date: Mar 15, 2010 3:01:48 PM

Carrickbeg (Sunday 14th - 2 to 4.5 hours)

On the Sunday we split with Tony, Steve, Roisin, Les and TJ heading off to Wildcat gorge in Leitrim. Unfortunately TJ managed to write off his car on route so Pavel, Artur, Eoghan, Emma and myself were left to drive carefully across to Carrickbeg.

Suffice to say this was a pure glory hunt for myself and Emma as we didn’t contribute to the dig at all. We made careful progress through the entrance choke, carrying two 3 litre bottles for Artur. The main stream way is fine easy going passage for about 500 odd meters. There are one or two deep sections but you don’t really need to swim much until a pretty straight forward duck at the end. After the duck more low, wet, half swimming passage to the right leads to the old dive lines at sump 1. Artur went off to dive in his borrowed (piss free) lidl 3 mil wetsuit while the rest of us headed back to the entrance to keep warm. Eoghan and Pavel then headed back up to the first sump to help carry out the bottles

We checked out all the small side passages on route but only found tight rifts of little interest.

Digging options for a sump 1 bypass appear limited to one rift on the right hand side of the passage before the first duck. It will require a lot of mud shifting. Artur dived past sump 1 to 'Farr' away and will probably pen a dive report and hatch plans for a return trip fairly soon.

Congratulations to the diggers, particularly Stevemuh and Tony who pushed on through on Saturday. Without a diggers head on me the choke seemed reasonable but it looks like a lot of effort went in to make it so. Also congrats to Artur for pushing the first sump so quickly and to Pavel for passing his first duck.

Class trip, class weekend - spring has sprung!

jock