Post date: Jan 9, 2017 8:30:55 PM

Éabha Lankford, Richard Cole, Claire Dunphy, Stephen Macnamara, ~6 hours

Against better judgement, I decided to still go caving with terrible, piteous manflu. It was to be a short surveying trip to mop up some of the high level passages remaining to be surveyed in entrance series and JCP. We met Éabha and Richard at the Shannon carpark right on schedule about three quarters of an hour after the prearranged time.

Richard rigged amidst helpful and hilarious commentary of the other three, and then we started our journey downstream checking every corner for survey potential. And guess what - we found a new chamber about 100m from the entrance! It's a squeeze up through loose boulders on the left, just after the first letterbox and before the Kitchen chamber. A smallish chamber about 5m diameter, but about 10m high - it looks like another side of the entrance collapse perhaps. A solid limestone wall continues up to the ceiling, and the floor is steeply sloped rubble. Honeymoon chamber.

After surveying that, we continued to the first gallery in JCP to map the high chamber up to the right. It links back with the stream near the Border Climb. There is a high mud/rock step in the middle which Claire had to use "all of her body arms" to scale.

Just after the first sump bypass squeeze, there is a muddy hole up on the left before you arrive to the second gallery. We knocked this off. It's a horrible muddy appendage of a stumpy grovelhole, but it's another 10.3m onto the survey, kerching!

Finally we paid a visit to Fang Passage - where you can see the high traverse line if you look up just after the second letterbox. It's been quite a while since we've been up there - the climb up from the stream is a bit hairy for the short-legged. There is a naughty step into the actual passage - a 1.5-metre lurch/jump over a long drop to the stream and into a phreatic tube. We had forgotten the cowstails for the traverse, so with only two belts between us, we agreed that Richard and I would go ahead to complete the survey from the inside back to the traverse where Claire and Éabha would wait.

It's quite a sizeable chamber and took an hour or so to survey. The leap back across the naughty step was pretty scary - rigged belts as a sort of cowstail onto the traverse line. You really do need cowstails for this one. We were running out of time so had to curtail the survey at the first bolt of the traverse. Éabha and Richard have *promised* to finish the tie-in back to the main streamway.

So the Shannon survey continues to grow: another 192 metres added in a short trip, plus a minor new discovery.

Plenty more surveying and discoveries to do - chat to Éabha if you're interested - she'll be managing the project :)

Steve.