Post date: Jun 4, 2009 2:55:48 PM

First group: Aileen Connor, Tony Furnell, Stephen (Muh) Macnamara, Stephen (Bus) McCullagh, Eoghan Mullan

Second group: Francesca Collucci, T.J. Connolly, Damien Datry, John McManus, Stephen (Jock) Read

A trip planning to get to the Easter Extension, explore and survey upstream and downstream, before camping overnight and returning the following day. Aileen, Muh, Bus, Eoghan and John were planning to camp; myself, Francesca, TJ, Damien and Jock were in for a day trip. Photos by Aileen.

After staying over at Les' house on Friday night, the five people in the first group changed at McGourty's around 10am and headed up to the cave before 11. Damien and Francesca arrived as we were changing and waited for the fafftastic team of TJ and John to extract themselves from Jock's parents' house, expecting to catch us up at the Snake Escape. So the first group headed into the cave but it was apparent even from the walk up that we might encounter some trouble; the rain was abysmal and was running across the ground as we walked. Sure enough, the entrance passage had a stream running along it (this was the first time I've seen this) and the pitch was wet... and very fast on the 9mm rope we rigged on the day! The waterfall from upstream Tullyard was in full flow and as we headed further into Shannon proper it was clear that the water would be pretty high most of the way down; from the Border Climb onwards the water was at least 6 inches, in some places a foot, higher than usual conditions. We decided to push on and see how far we could get, knowing that we probably wouldn't be able to meet our original objectives. At Les' climb we took the high route over the wet duck to stay out of the water, although the duck was doable at the time. Swingers' Corner was also deeper, although not as deep as Stevemuh, Aileen and Stevebus had seen it on a previous trip (no swirling maelstrom of water below the rope). Aileen made 6 or 7 attempts at the swing while Muh and I confused her with instructions -- still failing to make it across she resorted to being pulled across by Steve :-) There was high water all the rest of the way to Mistake choke, which slowed our progress. Another high-level bypass had to be engineered to pass a sumped boulder choke, emerging from an oxbow rift just downstream, beside the feature I like to call the Mud Castle. Shortly afterwards at "the" duck (the low arched ceiling which always has the most potential for blocking access during flood -- don't think this has a name does it?) we found about 10 cm of airspace making it quite "sporting". We continued on, now hoping that the party behind us wouldn't follow. Once we reached the stretch past Mistake Passage, the high water continued, only now the further we went, the deeper it became. Thigh deep, waist deep, chest deep, eventually reaching shoulder depth (on me, anyway) as we approached Aghnahoo chamber -- quite bizarre in a streamway which is usually welly depth. We traversed along the right-hand-side slope as much as possible, slowly, so as to avoid trampling any of the mud formations in the area. This was quite difficult, since many of these were underwater too. We eventually reached the first boulder slope up towards Aghnahoo Chamber, which we followed round to the next link back down to the streamway. It was obvious we wouldn't be heading onwards now and probably not camping even if we did, unless we waited 3-4 hours for the water level to drop. Curiosity got the better of the Steves and they both ventured down to the streamway again (using a guide rope attached to Eoghan) to check out the situation at George's Choke. Meanwhile Aileen and I went looking for the muddy crawling connection to the upstream side of the choke, accessible below Aghnahoo Chamber. We found our way to the streamway just outside George's and met Bus and Muh as they exited the choke; apparently it was all accessible until the right-hand squeeze at the end of the second chamber (beyond George's Pitt and the low rift squeeze). Aileen and I stuck around for a bit to take a look into the choke and take a couple of photos. Getting to Scaffold Alley required getting waist deep into the water (so a good 8-10 feet higher than normal) -- the water level had reached half way along Scaffold Alley by the time we left, bringing with us the spare scaffold bars and slings from George's Pitt for use in the Mistake Passage dig. On the way back to Aghnahoo Chamber we found Stevebus digging at a muddy crack trending upstream from one of the crawls, which he was certain was going somewhere... the rest of us aren't so sure!