I spent last week off the grid, merrily moving tanks from one location to another and back again. By the end of five days on site we had relocated over a tonne of dive gear from the east coast to the Nullarbor, from the vehicles to the water, and from the water’s edge to over 4kms inside the cave. The cave of course, is Cocklebiddy.

The quick trip had a goal – to return to Toad Hall with my Dad, nearly 34 years after he was the first diver to surface inside it. It was a family trip with Mum, Dad and I joined by Steve and Ryan and a film crew. You can see our documentary early next year on Red Bull TV. It’s part of the series called EXPLORERS – ADVENTURES OF THE CENTURY. Until our episode arrives, you can discover other explorers and their adventures in the latest season which is available online here: http://www.redbull.tv/…/AP-1JXZDZE8N2111/explorers-adventur… The windsurfing ep in the last season was shot in Tassie by our film crew from The Construction Site and is well worth watching.

I’ve been hearing stories about Cocklebiddy since I was a kid. To finally get to see the big railway tunnel of the second sump with both my parents on scooters beside me was pretty cool. It also gave me a new appreciation for exactly how much gear was dragged over each rockpile by the original explorers.

We had a mixed team of rebreathers and open circuit with individual bailout and team spares. Between six divers we took a ridiculous number of scooters, mostly DiveX. The two Pirahna P2s on the trip performed admirably – top speed on a P2 makes short work of the 200m long entrance lake! When said entrance lake has very cold freshwater for the top two metres, a rapid exit is the best thing to happen at the end of a long dive.

The second sump is a beautiful place. With the constraints of filming I wasn’t able to set up the photoshoot I would have very much loved to do. Rather than being flat, square and boring like I had imagined, the second sump is some of the most scenic tunnel I have had the privilege of diving. It varied between huge fallen blocks and sunken road formations, between craggy ceiling features and gently rolling floors. All of this set off by brilliant white walls, great vis, and miles and miles of cave unrolling before me. A return photographic trip is definitely in the works.

A big part of big trips is the preparation that goes into them. It’s nice to look at the results – great photos, new cave, nice maps, stories of epic adventure – but rare that the hours of practise and prep get the same publicity. So today’s photos aren’t spectacular or even very exciting. They are important though. Expedition diving is hard work, and a lot of that work occurs before the trip even begins. You have to put in the hours in advance to get results. Pretending that you were born a cave diving genius is fun but somewhat deceptive. It also encourages untrained or underexperienced divers to attempt things they probably shouldn’t.

With that in mind and an upcoming long-range scooter dive later this year, Mum, Dad and I have been spending time driving scooters up and down in fairly boring locations. So far we have checked out the delights of Little Blue sinkhole, a nondescript bit of sand off Cape Woolamai and Flinders Pier at scooter speed. Along the way I have refined my scooter attachment options, played with scooter trim and weighting, and determined my preferred trigger finger.

Flinders Pier is better known for beautiful weedy seadragons and nice macro life. From mid-water and at speed I spotted four or five surprised seadragons as well as a banjo shark and a massive stingray. Smaller life eluded me….macro spotting probably requires a slower speed. The pier gets pretty shallow at low tide. We weren’t sure how close to the beach we would be able to scooter, so the laps went from about halfway down the pier to the end and back again. This gave us an obvious turnaround spot (the platform halfway along) and allowed for an easy distance calculation on Google earth. With a return trip giving a 300m run, we chugged out laps and waited for the batteries to die.

While I had already done a bit of short range scooter time, the longer runs make problems more obvious. After the first kilometre my lower back was not happy with a towing position that had seemed great to start with. This was an improvement on a month ago but obviously isn’t going to cut it for the trip. My thermal comfort decreased significantly after an hour of cold water rushing past me. On the other hand, the arm and shoulder position was great and my trim in the water much more comfortably head down. I reckon there’s at least one more Sunday afternoon of cutting laps underwater in my future as it all starts to come together.

About the dive

With the back end of the main Weebubbie tunnel down at 40m, and the roof of the railway tunnel around 20m, long dives to the end mean a lot of deco back under the lake. After 90 minutes of photography, swimming and scootering in the depths Stefan and I had 60 minutes to kill up in the shallows. Rather than scissors, paper, rock competitions as the minutes crawled by, we decided it was time for some photographic experimentation.

One of the joys of cave diving is swimming through darkness and watching the walls light up with wandering dive light beams. If you lead the dive, you might see yourself in shadow outline, swimming along the wall of the cave. Light beams pointed at the wall ahead are there for signalling – circles for OK, flashes for problems, and a steady light to know your buddy is right behind you. I feel half blind when I dive in the ocean and have to turn around to check on my buddy. Of course, when you take a camera and light the whole cave with strobes these light and shadow plays are all flattened out in white strobe light in the images. This photo was a way to emphasise the shadows you might see on a cave dive that don’t appear in cave diving photos.

About the photo

The right hand wall of the cave at the deco spot is large, white and flat – perfect for shadow puppets. Getting the set up right took a little bit of fiddling. I initially set up a pair of off camera strobes perched carefully on a rock, and then turned one of them off to turn the double shadow into a single shadow. By angling the strobe to point at 45 degrees up, I could keep the camera at the same depth at the diver and create the shadow up above on the wall. The key here was to get complete separation of the outline of the diver and the outline of their shadow. This meant dropping down to 8m to place the strobe, before returning to 6m for the photography session and continued decompression.

The first shots showed the off camera strobe still bungeed on to Stefan’s sidemounted tank was showing up in the shadow as a strange lump. I moved that, and the next issue was bubbles. They looked fine on the diver, but the shadow bubbles looked a little bit like a smoke eruption out of the shadow diver’s skull. A few shadow bubbles were desirable, but I needed a clear gap between the bubbles and the diver and that required good timing.

With the basics down the next step was refining camera to model to light source to wall distances. By putting the diver closer to the light source, the size of the shadow increased. Get the diver too close to the off camera strobe and the light (and the silt from putting it down on a rock) was in the picture. I moved the off camera strobe further back from the wall to give us more space to play with. Then instead of taking the picture flat on, I moved around to the front to capture the two diver outlines swimming towards the camera. My on camera strobes were turned right down so as not to interfere with the shadow.

Out of the whole photo session at 6m, and hundreds of photos with bubbles in the wrong place and shadows too small, the one up top is my favourite. I like the way the leading shadow catches the eye first, and then you look back to see the diver. Stefan has turned to look at the camera, creating an alien outline in the shadow diver’s face. This is also a technique for beating the curse of the black dive gear. If you can’t persuade your models to buy drysuits in reasonable colours, this is a photo setup that doesn’t require being able to see the details of the diver. And if you are thinking of buying a new suit, red is a lovely colour!

About the trip

I’m winding my way down through the Adelaide Hills this morning, after watching the sunrise peek through the clouds. After time spent in the desert the road signs seems like information overload and there’s a lot of people around. We spent the last week at Weebubbie Cave, just over the West Australian border. Weebubbie is beautiful, and not just because you have to appreciate something once you’ve put in so much hard work to get there. Weebubbie has massive tunnels lined with white limestone and full of crystal clear water. From my point of view it was basically a week long photo shoot and I certainly flattened a lot of batteries in the process. Lighting the huge space in an interesting way was challenging, and it took some experimentation to get the shots I’ve posted here.

About the photo technique

When I set off the on camera strobes in smallish tunnels there’s a bit of leeway in which way the off camera sensors are pointing. Once the tunnel gets beyond a certain point of size or the walls get dark enough, the light stops bouncing back. This means the on camera light needs to hit the off camera sensors dead on and the distances at which the triggers will work is reduced.

Last trip in Weebubbie I had a number of frustrating experiences where the composition I wanted meant I was too far away from my model to trigger the off camera strobes. Over the last few months I’ve followed up on various technological solutions, including trying to find triggers that work on a different part of the EM spectrum with better penetration through the water. It seems that there’s not much that’s going to get through the water distance required fast enough for the camera shutter and therefore light-based triggers may be the best solution.

So if the triggers weren’t going to work, I considered putting down additional strobes on the cave floor between myself and my model. The chain strobing effect would put out extra light but also seriously slow down the dive. Another difficulty is that the floor in Weebubbie is covered in incredibly fine white silt. Each strobe placed down was going to create a milky cloud in the water, mid-photo – not ideal.

In the end, the solution that produced the photos above was an old-fashioned one. Instead of trying to trigger off camera light with on camera strobes, this technique relies on human co-ordination and timing. I moved the camera into B for “bulb” mode, turned off one strobe and pointed the other one back behind me. When Stefan saw the backward pointing strobe go off as I opened the shutter, he would manually trigger the off camera strobes, and I would take my finger off the shutter. With shutter speeds around one second all of our dive lights had to be off. I took a very dim LED backup torch and hung it down out of my drysuit pocket, which gave just enough ambient light so we didn’t swim into the walls. It was too small to show up in the photo, and also not enough to really help with framing shots of my invisible model in an inky black cave.

Taking photos in bulb mode like this created both more freedom and more restrictions. I could be as far away from the subject as I wanted, but it was very hard to compose the shots accurately. I had only a minimal idea of where my buddy was in relation to my lens, and that could change by the time he flashed the strobes. No way to time photos to catch bubbles here. Removing the foreground lighting also changes the way the foreground rocks are shaped from the camera’s POV, and that took some trial and error to improve on.

About the dive

We had three different sessions in the water trying this technique, with a photo review and improvement discussion each night. In the end, the most important predictor for success was getting everyone in the right place and all communications completed before turning off the lights. Once my eyes adjusted to the tiny amount of available light and with lots of water to swim around in, I really loved taking these shots. Floating in space, disconnected from everything, feeling the cave more than seeing it…all great fun. I hope you like the results.

I dived with Anja from Catalyst and filmed in Weebubbie back in late December, and I can’t wait to see the footage on the small screen. Weebubbie is a beautiful cave with huge spaces, white walls and clear blue water. Anja’s written up her impressions of the cave in the Catalyst blog for another perspective.

For some of the photos I took on the same trip, check out the surface lake here and the “Railway Tunnel” passage here. If you’re interested in the other Nullarbor caves (including some great “back in the day” shots from the original exploration of Cocklebiddy Cave in the 1980s) have a look at some of my other images or check out cave diving across Australia here.

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About the site

I talked about my quick trip out to Weebubbie Cave a couple of weeks ago. As well as having a stunning tunnel, it has the largest “cavern zone” of the regularly dived Nullarbor caves and was selected to allow our newly rated Deep Cavern diver room to move. To reach the underwater cave divers swim out from shore for a couple of hundred metres down a wide tunnel. In a circular, domed room at the end we descended down the rocky floor and into the underwater continuation. You can check out the photos from this massive space here.

With most divers focussed on reaching the back of the cave, I suspect we’re all swimming on the surface to conserve our air supplies through the lake. As I discovered on this trip, I could happily spend nearly two hours pootling around the lake zone and get some excellent photos. The lake itself is far enough into the cave to be in the dark zone, and is not affected by wind or current. This means the surface can be completely still and the darkness above helps with perfect reflections.

About the dive

Both of these photos were taken as we returned from dives down the railway tunnel – you can see the deco bottles hanging in the shot. Despite my best efforts in the huge tunnel I didn’t take enough pictures to flatten the strobe batteries and I was glad to have them going off as we gently swam home under the shimmering surface.

About the photo

The boulders that cover the floor come up to a point in the middle of the tunnel, with deeper patches on each side. In the top photo here you can see the left hand wall curving into the distance and the central spine of boulders running down the tunnel. More importantly, the reflection shows the same thing, giving some symmetry to the shot. Stefan’s bubbles have just hit the surface and the ring of ripples is about to spread out across the reflection.

The second shot here was taken just before surfacing back at the rockpile. By this point we’re in the shallows and swimming along just under the surface means the bubbles don’t have very far to travel. This gives a lot more time without any bubbles disturbing the water and you can see the mirror-like stillness. Pointing one of the camera strobes up at the surface has given a rippled light effect as it diffracts off the moving surface. The hotspot created by the off-camera strobes, and the dark edges created by the on-camera strobes starting to go flat draws attention in to the diver. Which all goes to show that you don’t have to go to the end of the cave to get the shot – sometimes it’s waiting for you, back in the entrance.

About the cave

Weebubbie Cave is out on the Nullarbor Plain, a long way from anywhere. The brilliant white limestone and huge water filled passages are the incentive for cave divers to drive across half a continent with half a tonne of dive gear to camp in the red desert dust.

The water tables lies between 80m and 100m below the Nullarbor. The trek with dive gear starts by lowering the lot over the edge into the doline, and continues with a hike into the darkness. Tanks, weights, dive gear, cameras, lights, lunch and everything else make the trip up and down the rocky slopes to the water’s edge.

About the dive

I was visiting Weebubbie for a filming trip for the ABC – look out for the February 21^st airing of Catalyst. With filming complete and the footage safely away, we bid the crew goodbye and hopped back in for two more dives before hauling the gear out 24 hours later.

The filming had been conducted in the lake zone, so this dive was a chance to descend into the tunnels that Weebubbie is renowned for.  On this trip I was lucky enough to meet and dive with Stefan Eberhard of Subterranean Ecology. Stefan features in the group shot from the 1983 Cocklebiddy expedition I posted here. In the past few years I’ve followed his maps through Junee and Great Nowranie Caves, so this chance meeting and opportunity to dive together was fantastic.

About the photo

The huge challenge here is the huge space. Even in the crystal clear water I found the off camera strobes weren’t triggering beyond a distance of about 30m. Although the walls are white, they’re too far away from each other to get light bouncing from one to the other. Triggering distant strobes required pointing the on camera strobes directly at Stefan, lighting a lot of water between him and I rather than lighting the cave itself. I upped to ISO to 800 instead of my usual 200 or 400 and tried to point light at solid surfaces to avoid blue haze as far as possible. From there it’s about the space and angles between the camera and the model so the distant diver explains the size of the passage.

We moved down the tunnel as I tested the distances, arriving at this point where it curves slightly to the left. For the top shot here I moved to the top of the tunnel to silhouette Stefan against the white floor – possibly the only good time for a diver to wear a black suit. Shooting the off camera strobes down at the floor haloes the diver in white, and avoids lighting up too much water. I love the darker shades of the tunnel ahead here…an enticing invitation to find out what’s around the corner.

Ron Allum sitting on his sleeping mat in Toad Hall, with his home made cave radio. This device provided underground to surface voice communication and allowed the Toad Hall team to report on the successful extension of the line in the third sump. The RDF that Ron invented also allowed the location of Toad Hall to be pinpointed on the surface 100m above.

Swimming home through the second sump. Note the additional cargo that’s been added to the sled – a few cave rocks. These aren’t decorative, as after the air had been breathed out of the 14 tanks in the sled, it was extremely positively buoyant. Fully flooding the buoyancy chambers at each end wasn’t enough to sink the sleds to neutral. Wedging rocks in the gaps helped but they tended to fall out until some bright spark came up with the idea of tying them on with string.

Another shot of the same sled, progressing home through the second sump and back towards the first rockpile. On the outward journey the central dry tubes were carefully packed with camping equipment and food. On the way home the packing was less careful and the gear expanded, as it does, and things didn’t fit. Prime among them was Dad’s white helmet and dry caving torch which can be seen perched on top of the pile, next to the empty reel. It filled with water during the swim and didn’t work again. The number of things hanging from the top of the sled demonstrates the slightly haphazard nature of the “we just want to go home” packing.

Back at the first rockpile, the sleds had to be emptied of their cargo so everything could be carried to the water on the other side. The team here is taking a rest break between loads. Only a few tanks left to go!

One of the sleds being hoisted up the side of the doline. Note the Australian flag on the top.

Nearly done…the sleds from the second sump are still covered in string where the excess baggage was tied on the outside. Tanks, drytubes and piles of regulators and wetsuits sit behind. From this angle on the sleds you can see the buoyancy control scubafeed system – the buoyancy chambers at each end could be controlled by a diver from one end. The sleds just needed a little more lead in the frame for the empty tank situation.

With the gear finally on the surface, the dive is done.

Ron hiked 4kms from base camp to reach the spot identified by his RDF device as being directly over Toad Hall. The cairn is still in place today.

With a celebratory beer in hand and the Australian flag in front of the group…check out the short shorts! From left to right in the back row we have:

Paul Aarbon, George Navas, Robert Gaillot, Chris Brown, Dennis Thamm, Robyn Allum, Peter Stace, Brendon Griffin, Simon Jones, Phil Prust, Charlie Tong, Peter Hudson, Graham Morrison, Stefan Eberhard, Peter Brown (local station owner), Darren Lille, Lester German.

Crouching in the front row are the three push divers, Ron Allum, Hugh Morrison and Peter Rogers.

For reference, here’s the map of Cocklebiddy that shows the exploration covered by the 1982 team, and that this 1983 expedition expanded on.

For another viewpoint on the exploration here’s Dad’s Cocklebiddy 1983 article covering the expedition as published in The Scuba Diver in early 1984.

Here ends the trip down memory lane for the original push dives into Cocklebiddy Cave. In case you missed the earlier parts, check out the 1979, 1982 and the first part of the 1983 expeditions by clicking here. Next week I hope to post some of the shots from the 2008 expedition which extended the line that Chris Brown laid on the end of Hugh Morrison’s 1983 line. The difference 25 years makes to the technology is amazing!