Pollkeeran, 19 June 2021

Team: Steve Muh, Aileen, Shane McKinley, Petie Barry, Camilla Casella

Time: 8 hours

Steve Muh organised a day-long assault on Pollkeeran, to continue the downwards progress made on the last trip. On that trip, a hole had been opened up into a small void space. Camilla and I arrived at the digface at about 2pm, laden with six scaff bars and about 15 connectors. The others had been in since about 11, and had opened up the void space and started scaffing it up. Until 5 we shored and dug, until the space was large enough for even me to comfortably sit and dig. But 6pm rolled around and Shane, Steve and Aileen had to make tracks to catch their callout.

Camilla and I still had time to spare however, so Steve left his drill and capping kit with me and I went to the pointy end to do some damage. There was only time to drill and fire 4 holes, but these were quite destructive and loosened things out quite a bit. After packing away the capping kit and drill I did a bit more crowbarring and opened up a view of another small void, perhaps one metre below. But there’s a lot of shoring to do before it’s going to be accessible. The draft is now quite strong, less so at the base where it’s a bit more diffuse and coming out of numerous small holes, but in the main shaft it’s consistently flowing past. Manpower and stacking space are the main concerns, going ahead at least 4 people are going to be needed to manage all the tasks, especially considering that convenient stacking space is now almost all used up so we’ll soon have to start carrying spoil back under the linel and deposit it beyond the scaffold forest.

-Petie