Below is an interesting trip report posted back in June by the cave-diver that drowned in Ireland this past week.
( Disclaimer: I didn't read the whole report, but skimmed thru it. ) Part 1 ______ We arrived to Bellaburke [ a small community in Ireland ] around 2pm, briefly chatted to the landlord and had a look at the resurgence cave called "Pollatoomary." The water levels were low but the visibility was nil, the entrance pond filled with brown murky water. A plan to bring Megalodon rebreather and to have a couple of goes through the -33m squeeze by taking off and putting the unit back on ( for a practice before a push below -103m) was immediately dismissed. The old nylon line from 2008 was completely fucked and not wanting to go home with nothing done I decided to put a fresh 4mm polypropylene line down to the squeeze and perhaps a little bit beyond, -40m ish. With a single tunnel – a small shaft with a couple of squeezes going vertically down to -45m, what could possibly go wrong, right? ;)) Once in the water the vis turned out to be between 10 -15 cm while undisturbed. We put the vertical line down to -14m in an open shaft at which point the first constriction was encountered so I turned around and escorted my buddy to the surface. Then I dived again with three cylinders: 2x Alu80 (210 B and 150 B) and steel 12l (210B). I passed the first constriction and approached the second one at around -21m. To my surprise the only way on that I could feel was kind of horizontal and quite tight, nothing like I remembered from 2008. But I was pretty sure there had been only one way on so I continued until I reached a lip of another shaft. This seemed more familiar and since I couldn't feel any sensible belay point at the top of the shaft (though no line traps either) I continued with a vertical ascent. Around -28 things got tight again (as expected) so I belayed the line to a piece of protruding rock (I remember having looked at that belay for a split second with a sort of a doubt as the rock was at a funny angle in the relation to the line and then ignoring it - Will do - I thought – I'll keep the tension and fix it bomb proof at the bottom). I staged one of the Alu80 and started wriggling down fins first. After reaching -32m no more progress could be achieved and after a very thorough examination by touch it turned out that the way down was blocked by head size, irregular shape boulders and sand. It didn't make any sense at all – it was a resurgence and I knew from the previous years that there was a good bit of a vertical shaft below that ( around 15m) so I couldn't imagine how that blockage could be created other than from a collapse above, an option that I dismissed immediately without any reflection. Having nothing better to do on that Sunday afternoon anyway I started removing the rocks from the constriction but after reaching 20 min bottom time and no progress at the dig I made the decision to turn the dive. The place didn't seem to be the way on I remembered from 2008 but what was it then? Some other parallel shaft? I reeled back to my Alu 80 staged at -30m, re-pressurised it, checked the content and clipped it in. I took out a knife, cut off the guide line 30cm after the final belay and started securing the remaining line on my reel. I was half way through the process when suddenly I saw a glimpse of the loose end of my guideline floating up in front of my eyes and disappearing into the darkness above! What the..?! Shit – that dodgy belay's gone! You fuckin' eejit, I told you! I threw my free hand towards it immediately but the water, just like in a bad dream when you try to run away from someone or something but you can't because the air seems to be thick like gelatine, slowed down my movement and I missed it by inches...it was gone... Fuuuuck!!!! Right then the line was probably no more than a meter above me but floating away further into the darkness with each second. I had to ACT; there was no much time for STOP and THINK. I got caught off guard but I knew I could fix it in no time if I acted quickly. I got off my knees and sprung into the darkness above. With one hand holding the unsecured reel with a metre of loose line or so and with the other sharking water above my head in search of the lost guideline I was briskly moving up the shaft. At around -22m, still finding no line I removed my 5mm gloves and threw them away, I couldn't afford not to feel the line when I came across it. I got a short flashback from Hell in November 2007...certainly not the first pair of gloves that I had to ditch to save my life... By the time the visibility dropped from already atrocious 10cm to practically zero. I could have closed my eyes as well and it wouldn't have made much difference. I kept them open though ;-) I stopped for a while somewhere in mid water to calm down my breathing which became too heavy. The gas I had was buying me time, and I needed time to sort out that shit I got myself into. I needed to calm down. I got things under the control and I moved up scanning the walls and the water above me with my hands like a blind man who lost his stick. But the damn line wasn't anywhere there! Soon the shaft above me got smaller and from what I could feel it started closing down...terrible feeling...I took a big breath and my reg took some water in, I choked, coughing violently and grasping for more air...Calm down! Calm down! For fuck sake... Stop acting like an amateur and CALM DOWN! As if it wasn't enough suddenly I was left with a chunk of the ceiling in my hand! I held my breath terrified when some more pieces of rock fell on my helmet and my shoulders...in a split second I understood the situation: not only the roof was closing down above me with no way on but it wasn't solid, it was just a boulder choke! Feck ! Do I have to always get the best bits?!? At least that explained the boulder choke at the bottom of the shaft... It finally occurred to me that my luck just ran out and now I was acting against myself. I missed the opportunity to sort it out with one bold move, my gimmick didn't work and now I had to pull back and apply a proper emergency procedure before it gets any worse: I needed to go back to the bottom of the shaft and start a proper lost line search. With my heart in my throat I slowly began to descend breathing as little as possible in the given situation; it certainly gave me another incentive to calm down and keep my breathing down, God only knew what the expanding bubbles of my exhaled air could do to that boulder choke in the ceiling and although there was very little I could do about it I understood it would be a whole lot better for me to never find it out. I moved down the shaft, I had to go back to the place where I'd first lost the line to fix my emergency rescue reel somewhere around and to start a systematic search for the lost line or the exit from there with a solid point of reference that you can always come back to, otherwise you can wander further into the unknown while the safety could be just metres away. Obviously I should have done it straight away in the moment when I'd lost the line but at the time I believed I could sort it out my way...besides, there was a single vertical passage there so what could possibly go wrong, AGAIN? (sarcasm emoticon here). But in a cave and especially in poor visibility nothing is as it seems and it's always stupid to assume otherwise: my progress to the point of the lost line at -30m was suddenly stopped at -27m where I simply reached ...a bottom! HOW THE FUCK IS THAT POSSI... Fuck, there must be yet another shaft...kurwa mać... I tried to picture the situation in my head and there must have been some kind of fork junction half way between the unstable roof at -17m and the blocked shaft at -32 that split the tunnel in two. So I went up again, feeling the walls with bare hands, trying to find the line until I got -17 m and the unstable roof again. I don't know why but I was equally if not even more shaken when the ceiling closed down above me again, as if I expected some miraculous little hole opened up in the meantime that would take me to safety. And still there was no sign of the line. It was like in a nightmare: I KNEW it must have been somewhere there yet it wasn't... I worked my way down again but this time I focused on not missing the presumed forked junction which apparently was there coz I eventually reached the spot where I’d lost the line at -30m. By the time I reached the bottom of the shaft I was in a bad shape. I mean not physically but mentally... I wasn't thinking clearly, the shock of reaching the dead end twice took its toll and that's when the first crisis came: I realised I would die there. So... It's Pollatoomary... I always wondered which cave it was gonna be ... now I've got my answer... and I must say I didn't see that coming, I mean not here, not like this... I wanted to go deep here with Megalodon and I knew that things could go wrong below -100m but to perish on a recce dive, to lose the line, get lost and run out of air...no, I didn't see that coming... … and those who never liked you but never had the courage to show it...only to talk behind your back...Now they’re gonna have their feast: 'I told you he's gonna kill himself one day, fuckin' cowboy' ... Fuckin' cowards! Leave it now Artur, it doesn't matter anymore... you need to prepare yourself, get ready to take it with dignity... For some reason the scene from Angels with Dirty Faces came to my mind, when James Cagney scowls like a dog and begs for mercy while being led to the electric chair... I watched it for the first time when I was nine and I was heartbroken for him. All he had been left with was to die with dignity but then that bloody priest, his childhood friend begged him to destroy his image and to pretend to be a coward for the sake of those kids who looked up to him. My task seemed to be infinitely easier, I didn't have to pretend to be a coward, I had not to be one. But wasn't I? I didn't know the answer. It's not that it got me completely by surprise, you sort of have to realise your mortality in a more profound way when you do this sort of thing... I mean in order to protect it coz you're more vulnerable, more exposed... Sure you can be killed by a car while coming back from a day in the office or walking your doggy but it's usually NOT your primary concern...here it’s different. I'm not paranoid about it, I never tried to put myself in a mode that “the cave was after me” ...well, maybe I should have... But boy, I always hoped it would come quick, put me to sleep first, gently... if I only had my Meg(alodon) now...there would be so many better ways to go... But she was coming in such an unhasty yet inevitable manner at my very full consciousness, and I knew it would be violent... Part 2 ______ So those were my thoughts down there. I didn't give up yet but I'd spent the last quarter wandering blindly from wall to wall, from the collapsing ceiling to the boulder strewn floor and as a result my morale was quite low… No, certainly I wasn't giving up, it's just what I was doing simply didn't work... I knew I had to keep trying, trying to the last breath but what if I was doing something wrong? You can't expect good results if you do things the wrong way, no matter how many times you repeat it. I was 33 and I've learned that lesson in a past in a hard way. And I didn't have THAT much time here to keep repeating ineffective procedures. I need to focus. Clearly keeping going up wasn't working, the way out there was blocked. But where am I in the first place and how did I get here?! I understood that staying at -30 m was a bad idea – my synapses clogged by dissolved nitrogen from breathing compressed Air at that depth didn't make me the sharpest tool in the drawer plus at -30m I was using 4 times more gas than on the surface. With my current surface breathing rate surly between 25-30l per minute I was too scared to finish that calculation... Focus, focus! I knew I needed to go up but I needed a plan firstly. So again - How did I get in that dark shithole?! Why is the way up blocked? Feeling like a character from one of the Kafka's novel who just woke up in some strange, alien world with no recollection of the past ( I reckon my short term memory was gone due to nitrogen narcosis and stress ) I kept interrogating myself. This can't be the Main Shaft! Did I jump off into some side passage? A side passage... a side passage?! OF COURSE! The horizontal passage! That's how I got here! I must have found a parallel shaft that no one including me knew about! Jesus Christ! And what was the depth there? -20m? -23M? Something like that... With a huge mental effort my mind was slowly shaking off the debilitating fog of nitrogen narcosis and the stress. I knew what to do now. Somewhere in the darkness up there, somewhere between -23 and -20m there was a small hole in the wall that would lead me through the diver size passage back to the Main Pollatoomary Passage. At least that was the current plan. Content gauges. No, I don't want to look at them. I'm composed, I don't need reassurance, I know what I have to do. If I have plenty of gas left it's not going to change much now but if I'm already running low on air I might lose the composure and let the stress retake control. So fuck it. Let's keep going. I've only checked if all three valves were open, I switched the regs and went straight up to -23m laying an emergency line from the bottom. The search begun. Almost immediately I felt an opening in the wall and I started squeezing in but after only a metre and a half it became too tight. Shit! That's definitely not the one I came from! I reversed backwards, finished a circular search around the shaft at -23m, found nothing else and then moved one metre higher. There I felt another hole, slightly bigger, which went for about two metres before it closed down as well...The cave, she likes me...she wants me so badly...Fuck You! Out of the crawl and back to the blind search again. I realised at that point that if I found the right hole eventually my line should be there too; there was no freaking way that the guideline, even a floating one could be pushed out of a horizontal passage since there was no flow there whatsoever. At -22m, the same level, I found another opening in the wall, nice in size, felt almost like 1mx0.5m. I investigated its edges by touch thoroughly- Shit, no line... Not that I could be very picky and had multiply choices of getting out of there so I decided to give it a go. I was quite bulky with my three big cylinders and when the passage became quite tight after only a couple of metres I removed one of the 11 litres tank from my side and clipped it onto a little butt d-ring on my Farrworld sidemount harness. Streamlined I could continue. The only thing was that there was no way this could be the route I came from... it felt way too tight and too horizontal while I had a strong impression that the one I came from was more spacious and gently sloping. I got stuck for a brief moment but after moving some rocks aside I could continue again. And how long is it?! It must be good 10m now? I would be delighted in any other situation but this one. Exploring to the very end … I laughed to myself but there was more despair in that laugh than anything else, I knew I was at the edge of breakdown... After what felt like tens of metres the crawl opened up into some sort of small chamber or a bottom of another shaft. First thing I started examining was the floor in search of my previous belay point. Nothing. Not good, not good at all... I rested there for a while, working on my breathing rate but the truth was that I was too scared to check the roof of the 'chamber' or the shaft, whatever I was in, scared to find out that there was no way out there either, scared to hit the roof again. I entered into the second crisis, more dangerous coz “rationally” justified: there was no line in the horizontal tight passage and there was no belay around here in the chamber. So pretty much I knew I didn't find the way back; I must have moved even further into the dark belly of Pollatoo-Mary and the chances to reach any surface there were close to zero. I want to leave a note. The decision surprised myself, I've never thought I would come to that point. I left so many things unfinished at the surface, things that I should have said to the people that I loved and cared... And this is probably the funniest part of the whole story: I was trying to decide whom should I write the note to, but the list was long and I didn't want to offend anyone! This is a fuckin' nightmare - I thought, and I didn't mean my current situation - It will be easier to have another go and try to save my life instead... Ok, it's a lie, funny or not but a lie, I've made it up. The truth is that there was only one person I could think about in that moment and whom I wanted to write to but I knew she wouldn't care so there was no point in the end... What an irony... And what would you possibly say, that you were sorry? Everyone is fuckin' sorry when his number's up, get your shit together ya little bollocks and try to get your ass out of here alive! Fucking drama queen... So I got a grip on myself, placed a belay and started ascending feeling the walls around me by touch but expecting to hit a ceiling at any moment. I moved on for a couple of metres up, the shape of the wall was driving me crazy as it created an overhang there but the way up was still open. Suddenly I felt some bits of a soft, flimsy line in my hand, I brought it up to my mask immediately and I recognised my old 3mm nylon line from 2008! Shut up! It's probably been washed in here by winter flood, doesnt' have to mean anything! I was trying to keep it real and not to get unnecessary excited but I must have admitted there was a slight chance I was back on the way out: the line was completely loose towards the surface but seemed to be solidly jammed ( or belayed!) somewhere down beneath! With my rescue reel in one hand and the newly found line in the other I kept ascending. At around -16m it was still going up wide open but the old nylon line was cut there. I tied it in to my rescue line, switched the regs and kept going up. I don't know if I had ever an equally tense moment in my life before: anything was still in the cards for me, a Russian roulette with two bullets in the chamber ... the only thing I got was a bit of an old line, I knew that the reality check might be cruel ... Then at -14m a fresh, light blue 4mm polypropylene line flashed in front of my mask. I grabbed it immediately and checked its tension, then I looked at the depth gauge, then I confirmed it wasn't the line from the reel I was just using, checked the depth again and then I finally smiled. It was the nicest 4mm blue polypropylene line I've seen in a long time...I found my guideline; the long 28 minutes after I'd lost it... You almost got me Mary... but not quite yet, not quite yet... I checked the gauges: 90B, 90B and 100B. Not bad, I had another 30min... I looked at Dr5 for my deco obligation but since I had forgotten to change the gas from Tmx 12/55 to Air it was useless displaying only the message: “YOU'RE ONE FUCKIN' LUCKY BASTARD - WELCOME BACK!”...;-) I stopped for 3 min at -9m and moved to O2 staged at 6m by my buddy but after 5min I'd had enough for the day and I slowly went for the surface. I was trying to act normal on the surface but I guess you can't just wipe it from your face the fact that for the last half an hour you thought you were dead, you can't hide it just like that...nor your bleeding hands covered with cuts and scratches... So the team on the surface somehow felt that something had happened but no one dared to ask any questions. We started packing the diving equipment straight away, it was late and we had a long journey back to Dublin ahead. As I walked through the field towards the car with the last bits of the equipment I stopped and looked back over my shoulder at the dark rising where slanting rays of the setting sun futilely tried to penetrate its troubled waters. I'll be back... Ref: vertical profile of cave: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o3WYyMegM_4/Tfgz-arggvI/AAAAAAAAAWw/N8J1Smfu094/s1600/Pollatoomary+Rising+sketch+3.bmp area where the diver got lost: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PJ4k44iBGic/Tfb5ROQLJUI/AAAAAAAAAWk/iEH137n2GB8/s1600/Pollatoomary+sketch.JPG Ref: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/images/2011/0910/1224303828237_1.jpg?ts=1315723415 This was cut and pasted from the deceased diver's own blog. David Locklear --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
