Have just completed another couple of big weeks caving and lots of driving. Three caving courses, three break throughs in caves in Waitomo, a stormy cook straight crossing and at least one 40 hour day. It all started two weeks ago when I was running a caving course for the OPC diploma students. This year they get a choice between caving and alpine. I got three cavers to teach everything I know about caving and to assess them on some high level unit standards. Spent 7 days in waitomo visiting a variety of caves including Wellington Hole and the far reaches of Haggas hole. To get to the back of haggas we went down the 1984 entrance. Havent been there for about 25 years and it was very different to what I remembered. Very loose, in fact so loose I refused to let the students go back out that way and we did the trip through to the main entrance. On the way we made a quick detour to a passage marked as draughting on the map located at the very end of the cave. This was in fact a tight crawl which took us to a chamber. Heather managed to push a very tight squeeze from which the draught blew. After 20 metres she managed to turn around and come back. The cave does however continue. Following on from this course Pip and I drove to Nelson where we caught up with Neil Silverwood. Neil and I ran a defense force cave program on Takaka Hill, this involved a few hours teaching going up and down ropes, a trip into Eds Cellar then an epic 14 hour trip through Harwoods. Took so long cause it was self managed. After the course finished on Friday Pip and I drove back to Waitomo. The only hassle was the weather. Gale force winds delayed out departure by 6 hours. Then a truck driver decided to spill a heap of oil on the boat delaying us by a few more hours. Eventually we got on board and turned up in Wellington at 2.00am on Saturday morning. The drive north at that time of the night was very easy with hardly any traffic till we got north of Mt Ruapehu, there we started to meet the crazy ski traffic at 6.00am. 7.30 we rolled into the HTG hut. PIp went to sleep, I got hold of Chris Whitehouse and we went caving in Ernies Waterfall for the day. Out at the end of Ernies are some digs, one of these will take us to Burr located only 50 metres away. One dig we hauled out tons of rock. The dig was very scary, I was digging up hill lying under a big slab I thought was going to fall and squash me. After being beaten several times by falling rock we managed to dig up about 2 metres. At this point the rocks got too big to move so we moved to another dig near by. We dug in this for a couple of hours and made a break through. I was digging up hill and the crow suddenly disappeared in to the mud. Pulling it out I could see a large chamber through the little hole. 5 minutes of frenzied digging and chris and I slid up through the mud into a little chamber about 5 metres long...whahoo...big break thu for ernies!! The way on looks to be down a real muddy rift. At this point I had been awake for 30 hours and starting to see double so we decided to head home. That night I got the best sleep I have had for a long time. The second block of Dip cave has started. We have just finished Day 2 out on the Costers (ex Haggas) property. While waiting for the students to finish some rigging assignments, I decided to chase up some leads. One hole went down a bit and had a good draught blowing into it. Managed to trace the wind to a narrow crack. 2 metres down the crack the cave got bigger - who has a bang license? Next hole I went down a 10 metre pitch through a very tight squeeze, down more climbs and had to turn back at the top of a 10 metre pitch. Good draught blew into this cave to. Tomorrow the plan is to teach the students how to survey and survey the small caves and get down the pitch. I think this is a cave I explored about 15 years ago. Kind of looks familiar, however I cannot remember how it ends. Will find out tomorrow. :-)
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 08:55:27 +0000
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