26.04.2008
Divers: Jim Warny, Artur Conrad
On Saturday Jim dived first. After reaching the point where I tied off the line on -19m he went up to -15 until the passage which turned out to be kind of crevasse started closing up. He came back to -19m and noticed some possible although not very promising way on leading down. He tried to follow it but got badly entangled in the line and had to remove the bailout to free himself. I imagine that vis by this time has reduced to zero ( very silty area). He returned after 1.5h and wasn't very enthusiastic about what he found. Neither was I. Getting into the water I had a vision of myself crawling through the silt in blackout in hopeless attempt to find the continuation...
At the EOL, taking advantage of reasonably good visibility I realised that way down described by Jim is actually quite comfortable and steeply drops over thick silt covered floor. After a while and to my amazement I reached silt free floor on the depth of 38m
, which marked the deepest point of the cave. As my PPo2 reached 1.5 due to 31% mix on my back I tied off the line and started my return.
27.04.2008
On Sunday, expecting easy continuation on max depth -38m I prepared EAN 28 in 10l stage. After reaching -38m I started laying line along left hand side wall. Soon it turned out that my 'floor' was only ledge and darkness opened below and on my right. I did few 'DIR' belays by wrapping the line around protruding flakes but finally I found myself swimming along the wall in mid water without any belay points. When my line ran out I reeled it back to last DIR belay, secured it with snoopy loop and drop down... Floor has been reached on -43m, free of silt, with plenty of belay points. After drop of 24m ( from -19 to -43) I got the feeling we're back into the main conduit. Was it due to over excitement or was it nitrogen narcosis I got myself in some nasty entanglement with helmet, stage and reg involved and while removing half of the gear to get out of it I already knew that my next dive here would be on trimix.
Jim dived after me adding 40m of line on max depth of -45m which as we already presumed was the greatest depth achieved in any Irish underwater cave. The dive went smoothly, Jim was 'slightly narked but delighted' and he confirmed that big passage continues strongly SE direction. We couldn't be happier that day. After 5 weeks we were back in the main conduit!
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