Post date: Apr 7, 2010 12:44:50 PM

Stephen Macnamara, Robin Sheen, Shane McKinley - 3 hours

An ICRO training trip rather than a Shannon trip - but a very productive one! We went straight to the recently moved area, just before the final squeeze to the open river. Nothing had changed since Artur and my last trip.

I moved one of the football-sized rocks up a slope out of the way, and then banged a protruding rock to enlarge a squeeze and facilitate getting another basketball-sized rock (which I also capped) out of the way.

While Shane worked below the vertical squeeze to put in a couple of bars, I worked at the dodgy area to put in a couple of dubious pieces in preparation for our "coup".

All ready, we started knocking out stuff to make safe what we could, and then Robin bravely squeezed by the worst offending ceiling rock. From his new angle of view, things actually looked not as bad as expected, and he merrily set about capping the pointy rock in the floor. This went beautifully after about 3 caps, and the one in the ceiling can stay where it is - seems to be quite stable. We did some rock packing and put in a few more bars before making our way into the cave proper.

So Carrickbeg is reopened. There are about 4 or 5 loose bits of scaffolding and connectors in there, which should be put to use to further secure the entrance, and a bit of cement would go very well on the ends of some of the bars and to make fast our rock packing.

Steve.