Post date: Jun 24, 2015 7:49:08 PM

Aileen Brown, Shane Diffley, Jack Healy, Becks Kelly, Stephen Macnamara, Rob Mulraney, Hugh Norton, Michal Spigiel, 10 hours.

It has been an age since the peace accord of 2011 and the cessation of all digging activities in Shannon Cave, but the boulder choke at the end of Mistake Passage hasn’t gone away you know. It has been on our mind for the last few years. With some slagging regarding the disintegration of the Shannon Group (what with Steve Bus’s emigration westwards and Claire Dunphy’s emigration eastwards), we decided it was time to kickstart the Mistake dig again.

A surprisingly large number of people responded to the email, so we set off from McGourty’s cottage with 8 cavers. We were all assembled at the bottom of the entrance pitch at about 4 pm, where we split into two groups for reasons of efficiency. Rob, Michal and Jack and I headed in first with digging and capping gear, while Aileen, Shane, Becks and Hugh followed with surveying gear.

Progress was steady through the main streamway (enlivened when Michal waded through Swingers’ Corner in the buff), and we deposited bags near the end of Mistake to take a quick look into the boulders. My last trip here had been in early 2012, when we had fun reducing some rocks at the stream level with Gaelan Elliffe and his box of tricks from the boys in Co. Clare. You can progress for about 30 metres (if memory serves correctly) through the boulders at water level before being confronted by the inevitable digface.

This time however, our attention would be on a high-level rift above our heads. Access is by a mud bank some 20 metres upstream from the start of the choke. This climbs diagonally upwards and backwards (upstream), via several muddy thrutches and squeezes, to a small pincer hole between two boulders. The lower one is sort of jammed in the rift, while geologists believe the upper boulder is suspended by hatred. Once through the hole, you find yourself at the base of a funnel with a loose, rocky slope above you. It was from this slope that a rock slid onto Aileen on the trip of September 2010, and the offending rock was the focus of our efforts for the next hour or so.

A couple of caps were deployed with the help of new firing pins from Gaelan, and this broke the object into several perfectly sized fragments which could be passed through the funnel apex to Jack below. After some tidying in the area, Jack, Michal and Rob also squeezed up. This is near the top of the rift, and here you can start to progress back in a downstream direction again. We all crawled through Russian Roulette (The Pavel Press) and into the rift beyond. The passage is annoying here: reminiscent of the Snake Escape.

At the rift junction, we continued in the downstream direction to the digface, where we spent about an hour moving rocks into a crevice to make some space for future digging. While it appears to be a good location, the draft here is very faint. An incense stick might lead the way. Unfortunately time was against us and we had to turn back despite being still quite fresh… next time we will get underground earlier!

On our next trip we hope to survey from this upper digface back down to the lower digface at stream level, so that we can see their relative positions before we commit. Another objective is to make the Russian Roulette passage easier using rope and hammers as appropriate – especially if this is to evolve into a long term dig.

Aileen had kindly left Snickers bars at Mistake Junction, making the outward journey somewhat pleasanter. I was out for about 00:30 so sped ahead to prevent a callout, leaving Jack, Michal and Rob to derig. The other group were out in time to cancel our official callout of 00:00 – there were stories of boulder squashes and getting lost on hillsides but someone else will have to tell you that story.

Steve.