Tony Furnell, Stephen Macnamara, Stephen McCullagh, Eoghan Mullan; ~24 hours

On this weekend's camping trip we aimed to push the Easter Extension to a conclusion and survey back to the Snake Escape.

Eoghan, Tony and SteveBus left Belfast in the afternoon to enter the cave at about seven on Friday evening, while I drove directly from work to meet them later inside the cave.

My trip in was uneventful. I picked up one of the bags we had left in Aghnahoo Chamber from the last, flooded-out camping attempt, and carried on through the Mayfly Extension and into St Patrick's. At the junction below the campsite I happened upon the welcome sight of another caver - Tony, who was collecting water - and we scrambled up towards the campsite.

The chamber was bathed in light when I arrived, and Steve and Eoghan were sitting amidst a host of small candles. Very homely and cosy indeed - not least because they had turned out to be scented candles. We dug a trench in the floor outside the tent to allow standing without stooping, and completed the short survey from the last marked station up to that point. Afterwards, dinner of pasta followed by bed.

In the morning after breakfast, we went straight to the Snake Escape. We pushed along at low level rather than going high as usual, and succeeded in finding an easier way to Starlight Aven (photo below, with SteveBus ascending). We soon got to the previous limit of exploration, about 80 m along the Easter Extension streamway, and Eoghan ploughed on into virgin territory.

The streamway continued in a similar fashion for another couple of hundred metres - very pronounced meanders in a small streamway with walking/stooping passage. There were plenty of small oxbows on the way. Eventually, we found what we had been hoping we wouldn't - the wet bits. It started off not too bad - a hands-and-knees crawl through elbow-deep water which Tony braved first. A bit more dry stuff, and then more crawling through deeper water. Finally, a lovely ear-wetting duck involving a total soaking brought me to ... a sump.

The sump, "Just Try Me", was in fact very inviting: through the clear water, I could see the floor taking a one-metre step down and a comfortably sized tunnel continuing underwater. Alas, the others couldn't be coaxed through the duck to see it.

They checked out some high-level rifts before the really wet bit, including a small lead Tony found going into a "Rebirth Canal II" (photo below). It's not very high priority as it's quite far from the sump.

Returning from the sump chamber, I chimneyed a rift, some 15m back from the sump, to a height of 10m above the stream. Near the top, one must launch oneself in to a tight, vertical tube in the ceiling. In the small chamber above, a bit of digging would give the keen spelaeologist access to flat-out crawl going in the direction of the sump. However, at that moment a sodden furry suit was dampening my enthusiasm, and I slid back down the vertical tube (with welcome help from SteveBus on where to place my feet - you emerge with legs dangling in space above the rift).

The cold of complete immersion was starting to get to us all now. Tony needed to be out for a gig and Steve was jet-lagged from an American trip the day before, so they started to make for the surface. Eoghan and I considered surveying our new find, but the prevailing mood was to leave also. We felt a little guilty, but we were soaked and would have been frozen had we waited around any longer.

So half of our objectives were complete - Easter Extension pushed to a conclusion (for now). It will be tough work to extend it - getting diving gear to that point will be a mega-trip, and the potential digsite above the sump is restricted to small people and is one of the most remote places in the cave. Does this make it the remotest place in Ireland? Is there any other place in any other cave that could compare? Comments welcome!

SteveMuh.

(photos by Tony)