Meanwhile, climbing operations in the ninth chamber found an abandoned outlet passage which terminated very close to the surface, as well as a dry overland route downstream through the higher levels of the eighth, seventh and sixth chambers as far as the fifth chamber. These discoveries were used to enable the show cave to be extended into the ninth chamber and the cave divers to start directly from here, bypassing the dive from the third chamber onwards. The way on from the 22nd chamber was at last found by Colin Edmond and Martyn Farr in February 1976 and was explored until the line ran out. A few days later Geoff Yeadon and Oliver Statham somewhat controversially reached the 23rd chamber after laying just a further of line. A further three short dives and they surfaced in the 24th chamber to be confronted by what Statham described as "a magnificent sight—the whole of the River Axe pouring down a passage high by wide" terminating in a blue lake after . This lake was dived by Farr a few days later for at a maximum depth of to emerge in the 25th chamber, a desolate, muddy place named "The Lake of Gloom".