The Cave

This photo shows the mouth of the cave, with the river running directly out of it. The entrance pool is directly behind Dave H and Costa. It is rocky, with a few logs inside, and is around 5m deep. Conditions in the cave are generally good, with clear visibility, but water temperature is around 8 degrees C which is quite a shock to the system for those of us from Sydney who do most of our diving in more temperate waters.

The last push dive here was done in February 2001 by Dave Apperley using his twin redundant Inspiration rebreather. During a solo dive he left the end of the line in 120 m depth, with a maximum depth of 126 m during the dive.

This is the basic profile of the cave. The river flows from within the cave, upwards and out through the entrance, this being the beginning of the Pearse River. Leading off and down from this pool is a passage called Nightmare Crescent, which continues along for approximately 50m and opens out into the main shaft at a depth of 18m. Also leading off Nightmare Crescent are a few other passages, one of which, the Gargleblaster, joins the main shaft at a depth of 43m. The main shaft is not truly vertical, there are several slight bends on the way down, so you can't just do a free-fall down. The bottom of the main shaft is at 108m depth, and from here a rubble floored passage, the Needle Bender, runs off and continues on a downward slope. This passage bottoms out at 126m, then starts to climb again until at 120m a large room is entered. Within this room there are several leads which we hope to explore. Two of these are small looking passages, one in the roof and one in the opposite wall. The other is the floor, or really, the lack thereof. The floor simply drops away and Dave estimates that the floor is beyond 160m as his big torch doesn't show anything but a big black hole! We would have liked to have found an ongoing passage at a reasonable depth, but at this stage it appears that the river comes up from this shaft, so further work towards finding upstream links will be down here.