Post date: Feb 13, 2011 10:44:16 PM

Al 'Penguin' Kennedy, Petie 'Sometimes Coherent' Barry

Trip time - 7.5 hours. Total surveyed - 87.37 m in 26 legs.

Kept awake by certain ICRO introductees until the wee small hours, the Shannon trip got off to a somewhat prolonged start. The plan was to survey the mainstream passage downstream of Brown Shiver and Brown Shiver itself, followed a bit of digging in Brown Shiver.

Kitting up was reasonably pleasant, and with another caving vehicle parked at McGourty's yard we were expecting to have company in the cave. However the rope on the pitch was still stored, so either our fellow cavers were off digging, or planning a Sanctum-style through-trip. Due to our fragility the inward trip was a little slower than it might have been, with caving heads having been left on the floor the night before. Apart from my comic hesitation in parts of JCP, the only incident of any note was Petie's mysteriously developing sore shoulders, which eventually caused the abandoment of the crowbar and digging plan.

At the Brown Shiver choke we had a bit of chocolate and started searching out the points in the mainstream passage. Eventually we settled on one that could be identified reasonably accurately, for there were no surviving marks. Petie took the Tandem, and we discovered that, presumably because of his new implant, his Duo was magnetic too. After a bit of discussion we decided to take a lesson from Sanctum and survey using miniature glowsticks. With four strapped to the compass, three on the clino, and 10 on the front of his helmet Petie was back in business and bathed in pale pink light.

We started on the mainstream, a bit of passage that i'd not been into before. It took a few legs to get back in the hang of sketching but after that it all went swimmingly, although Petie constantly complained about my slowness (i might have made comment on his painfully ponderous compass work, but i refrained). The passage was quite pleasant, with the odd awkward bouldery bit, being large spacious canyon-type with car-sized boulders jammed in the roof. A short distance before the sump is a bridge of quite artfully jammed boulders, about 2 m above the stream and with a 2 m span; it was dubbed the Bridge of Mostar - but may already have a name? 58 m surveyed in 16 legs.

Then came Brown Shiver. The first four legs took an hour to shoot, through the boulder squeezes. At the wet squeeze Petie got one side dampened, but i just about managed to push through the dry gap above, this is tight and awkward as you have to 'float' in the widest part at the top. With caving head still playing catch-up i required a bit of assistance from Petie. (If this ever became a desireable piece of passage it might be worth capping this.) The remainder of Brown Shiver up to the end of the mudbank on the right-hand wall - nicely laminated mud and sand - took another hour. 29 m surveyed in 10 legs.

The outward trip was relatively painless, with both of us a little more awake. We were greeted by horizontal freezing rain on the surface, which made for a miserable change.

Al