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Nearly 2 years after my first descent of Pollnagosan as a fresher, I have returned as the person leading this cave. With Ronan's approval and heads-up, Patrick Meath, Eamon, Sean Thompson, Lylian, Cormac and I headed down and into Pollnaossan on 17/02/24 at 12 pm.
Pivturer of me in Pollnagossan in march 2022
The plan was to crawl past the Car Wash, into the Waterfall Chamber take a left at the first major junction, and head past Trench Hall, hopefully making it to Mud Chamber.
Our first challenge was finding the cave entrance tho, It had been a while, and all I remember was the remnants of glass and a horizontal rift-like entrance. All I know about its history is that there was a clean-up of the cave a few years ago, as it had been used as a dump by the locals in the past. after making a mistake in its precise location, heading a bit too far to the left and ending up behind it, we backtracked and followed the trail from the road down to the entrance. below is the topo of the cave and to the right is our group picture before heading in! look at how clean we are!
Sean Thompsan, Cormac, Patrick Meath, Eamon, Lylian, Jamie Clarke
After finding out about a missing hanger, we used the opbag to eliminate rope rub and skip the deviation.
Paddy coming down the first vertical pith after Sean.
As I headed in with the rope to rig, I waited at the beginning of the car wash to make sure the others followed. To my surprise no one did, so I headed back out to find that Cormac had lost his spare torch. I decided to continue forward with Sean to rig the pitch up ahead to make the journey for the others quicker when they joined us. I made Paddy follow me and Sean until the car wash to show him where to lead the others, giving him detailed instructions on where to go, I was basing my instructions off the Topo, but also from memory as I find the Topo to be somewhat outdated / not enough detail its scale.
Sean and I made it past the car wash and reached our first hurdle, clearly someone had taken out some hangers, not uncommon in French caves but somewhat uncommon in Ireland. I decided to rig the first anchor point with a piece of cord I use for prusiks, and a sling and made my way to the waterfall, this would surely hold as I equalized the pressure and made sure that both of them were attached to smooth rock.
I rigged with the Fusion 8, a knot both Sean and I had recently learned, meaning he could check all of my rigging as we continued. The waterfall pitch was another challenge, the rebalay was already in place, which was useful, but again one hanger was missing, i quickly learned that the rigging topo was somewhat outdated, and someone had removed and installed new anchors. Taking some initiative looked at the angle of the deviation, and concluded that the rigging would still be safe due to the backups I had made and the extra slings I installed. I descended the waterfall and rigged the rest of the pitch, making a mistake on the last one, putting the fusion 8 the wrong way around, introducing a problem that was more an inconvenience than anything, but more on that later. Having to skip the last deviation due to the hanger missing, we used a kit bag to prevent the rope from running on the sharp rocks. in the end, I made sure that every anchor was backed up and there were no rope rubs, the rig, confirmed by Sean on the way down, was safely rigged to the cave floor.
As mentioned above, we learned that if your carabiner slips down the wrong side of the fusion 8, no concerning issues arise, but instead of easily coming off the carabiner pushes itself underneath 2 of the strands, when pressure is applied to the ropes going down to the ground it jams underneath 2 of the strands, only coming out when pressure is applied elsewhere. I believe this is an issue caused by how I dressed the knot, so I've been studying it a bit more to prevent this from being a consistent issue.
In the end, we all made it to the bottom, including Cormac.
Me heading back to find out about the lost headlamp.
Me Rigging the pitch just after the first deviation.
After all making it down we started our adventure towards the mud pits, I recomended to take off the srt kits, which not everyone did due to personal preference, and we got through the first mucky chamber. After dirtieng our equipment we set up a number system, previously hard to do as the noise of the waterfall and also the disaperaring of cormac before entering the cave. All six of us would regualarly shout these numbers in order to confirm we were all present and well.
All of us lyng down at Trench Hall for a picture.Cormac, Lylian, Jamie Clarke, Sean Thompson, Patrick Meath, Eamon
We continued down towards the Mud Chamber, having a much fight at the T-Junction, mainly cause we had misread the map, and assumed it was trench hall. but after catching on quickly we went down and started the crawl. We took some photos and took our time with everything, we werent in a rush, making it to Trench Hall we took the picture above.
We continued down towards the Mud Chamber, but As i checked the time I released we had about 2 hours to get above the surface due to our callout, so at the K mark on the map we stopped. meet this frog:
I stopped everyone and asked what they had learned, some said not to let Lylian choose the cave (due to the car wash 🤣), The Ups and downs of the Fusion 8, and other topics that I can't remember on the top of my head, at the end of the day they learned something important.
On the way back I sent Eamon and Lylian up first to cancel the callout. Paddy would de-rig the pitch and I would supervise it if he needed help, and Sean would go between the rest to help Cormac and the others if they needed help. At approximately 17:40 Eamon and Lylian made it out and cancelled the callout. Paddy and I got out at 18:05. We Packed up our stuff and headed to the pub for a well-deserved pint.
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