Post date: Nov 4, 2018 8:36:56 PM
Team: Adam Prior, Petie Barry, Claire Dunphy, Stephen Macnamara, Emily Punzalan, Seamus Breathnach
Trip Length: 7.5 hours
After finally seeing an email about the removal of a certain boulder in Geroge’s Choke, I found myself excited for another stint of Shannoneering (cave and group). I signed myself up, prepped my caving gear on the Thursday night, and woke Emily up from a late night nap with a phone call requesting to sleep at hers so Seamus could pick us both up early. Early it was, as Seamus arrived with Petie at 06:45. The four of us proceeded from Dublin to McGourty’s farmyard while praying for the rain to stop. We arrived and were greeted 20 minutes later with an infuriated Claire (featuring Steve), who had been denied a fill at Clancy’s.
The plan for the six of us was to blast away the boulder blocking Geroge’s Choke, install a handline for a climb to a dig near Mistake Junction, and finish the survey of the Stationmaster Series. Amassing together our equipment, we realized we had no shortage of DistoX’s, none of which were calibrated (Petie’s, Steve’s and my own). As we would be traveling with heavy capping and bolting equipment, we opted to only take two of them with us (redundancy is good).
We were nearly at the entrance before I realized we hadn’t left a callout. Luckily Petie had brought a phone and left us a nice callout of 8 o’clock. While he was doing that, I rigged the pitch in the entrance of Tullyard. It seems Shannon group always makes the group baby do the rigging. We made good time getting through the cave, getting only two-sixths wet at Swinger’s Corner and arriving at the Stationmaster Series. Here we split into three groups. Petie and myself would finish the survey of the higher level passage above us while Emily and Seamus would install the handline and Steve and Claire would cap the boulder.
Petie and I began our surveying with a couple of attempts at calibrating one of the Distox's. I found the passage we were surveying to be (as Petie perfectly described) consistently sphincter tightening. Loose rocks and bouldery death climbs suspended 20m+ over the streamway below was the state of the passage for the most part. We surveyed upstream direction as far the previously explored end, a large drop down to the streamway, but found it could be traversed around to the right into an obvious continuation if a traverse line was installed. We noted this and made our way back to link the other end of the series back to the streamway. On the way back, I wiggled my way up a fairly exposed climb which led us to some impressive virgin passage. Solid ceiling for a good bit, a huge chamber with one possible lead, and very large winding canyon passage to another deep drop to the streamway. This drop could again be traversed with the installation of a handline, as a bouldery/gravitational death would surely occur otherwise. In total, we surveyed 135m of passage bringing us to within about 350m of 8km of surveyed passage. The survey mission wasn't over as we still had to tie in the survey to the streamway.
We were just finishing up as the other two groups arrived at the junction with the series. The installation of the handline was a massive success, as was the destruction of the pesky boulder. This trip truly did usher a new age of exploration for the cave. We made a rapid escape from the cave (for no particular reason). Seamus, Petie, Emily and myself were back on the road to Dublin by18:15
Adam.