Our Elk River supply trips are now down to a fine art. Each push trip requires two or three resupply trips – removing the empty tanks from the previous exploration, taking in full tanks, plus caching other gear as required. We are now using a lot of carbon fibres tanks for the longest swim through sump 7. The carbon fibres are much, much lighter than equivalent steel or aluminium tanks and can hold higher pressures.

The drawback of the carbon fibre tanks is their buoyancy characteristics in the water.We have placed kilos of lead weights at the diving gear up spot. Each 9L tank takes 6kgs of lead to sink it. We are definitely not carrying this lead backwards and forwards. But there are four small sumps on the way home that the carbon fibre tanks need to pass through.

My preferred technique for passing sumps with a very buoyant caving pack is to descend and get myself under the lip of the rock ceiling. From there, flipping upsidedown and bracing against the ceiling allows for a good tug on the caving pack. With the pack safely wedged under the lip it’s a matter of doing the upsidedown spider crawl across the roof.

On the far side of the sump the pack will rocket to the surface as soon as it is free of the roof. The accompanying diver can then surface, remove mask, clip the pack tether and keep on trucking down the cave.

These photos were taken on our way in last Saturday. The water clarity was remarkably good and I was able to get some underwater shots on the small camera. The manual settings on the Lumix allow for a fixed shutter speed of 1/25 and with an ISO of 800 this is enough for the Scurions to light up the picture. It may not have the quality of the dSLR, but the Lumix is a lot easier to transport through the cave!

We had an interesting weekend in Elk River with the longest trip underground to date. After multiple set up trips to replace empty tanks with full ones we headed in to use them. The trip was complicated by large floods that swept through Buchan two weeks ago. I wasn’t sure what effect the raised water level might have had on the cave, or the gear cached throughout. The first victim of high water levels was the first aid kit, laid out on a beach before sump 4. We found most of the items from the kit floating in the water just before sump 4 and were able to rescue them all. The bag itself had made further progress and was wrapped around a rock a few hundred metres later.

One tarpaulin and some of the foam matting at the camping spot had also succumbed to the water. The tarp was hooked up on a rock on its way to sump 5. By this point I was a little concerned about our tanks at the beginning of sump 5. On arrival it became apparent that most of the tanks had been washed into the streamway below. Luckily they hadn’t travelled very far with the steels sinking immediately and the carbon fibre tanks bobbing around at the start of the sump. The foam wrapping stored with the tanks was also floating in the entrance pool.

More importantly, the fins that had been perched high up the rift were gone. We sent Sandy on a treasure hunt recovery dive into sumps 5 and 6. She surfaced half an hour later with four fins and the kettle. Good haul! Meanwhile Steve, Dave and I rigged the large tanks for diving. I assisted with the gearing up process and waved the others goodbye around 5pm. By 6pm I was back at camp and an hour after that I was warm and dry. Wrapped up in thermals and a sleeping bag, I fully intended to read the 200 pages of book I had photographed on my Lumix. After ten or so pages I passed out and woke up three hours later. Caves are quiet, dark and peaceful – a great place to catch up on your sleep.

As I napped in the dark, the other guys had proceeded through sumps 5, 6, 7 and then 8. They carried the push tanks down to the start of sump 9. When Steve last pushed sump 9, he surfaced to see both a dry lead and possible continuing underwater passage of sump 10. This time around Dave stayed in the water while Steve and Sandy investigated the dry lead. Unfortunately both options ultimately clogged with mud. The water flow in the area suggests there may be a better underwater option further back in sump 9. The collapsed and muddy end of the dry lead currently holds the prize for furthest reach of the known cave.

The push team returned to cave early the next morning. After a few hours asleep, some hot food and an unpleasant struggle back into wet wetsuits, we clipped on the caving bags and started the long haul to the surface. We surfaced onto the starlit potholes around 6pm Sunday, 32 hours after our descent on Saturday morning.

The weekend before last saw us back in Elk River. After an exciting push trip back in January and a subsequent epic tank extraction trip in March, it was time to start loading freshly tested and filled tanks back into the cave. Going downhill is easier than hauling tanks up to the surface. However the air inside each tank definitely adds weight and as we had a three day weekend on our hands we made good use of it. On both Saturday and Sunday Dave, Sandy and I humped a large tank from the surface to the beginning of sump 5.

There had been good rains in Gippsland in the preceding week. I was hoping for slightly higher water levels (to assist with floating the packs over the tricky bits) but not too high (so as to prevent us from diving). While the water was slightly milky which indicates a small flood surge might have been through, water levels were very normal. As a result, we rolled, lifted and heaved the caving packs over the usual shallow spots. I much prefer flowstone on the walls as I wade past, rather than on the floor under a low ceiling.

Our trips into Elk now easily exceed the outcomes that we had in the first year of doing this. Rather than complaining about two 7L tanks between the group, we’re each relaying 9s and 10s into the cave. Our equipment has improved drastically, with custom caving wetsuits, great headlights and better footwear and gloves. Small things like packing a foam sleeping mat around the large tanks means that the caving packs are lasting twice as many trips before holes start to appear. All in all, our trips in and out are both more efficient and more comfortable.

This expertise didn’t stop me from dropping my Lumix in sump 3 on this trip and being very lucky to find it again in the mud. Elk is still borrowing and breaking our gear on a regular basis. And of course, the end of the known cave is now a lot further away than it used to be. With enough large tanks in there at the moment to support another dive through the long sump 7, it will soon be time to start planning an attack on the end. Sump 9 awaits!

All of that floating around in the pleasant tropical surrounds in Truk Lagoon had to come at a price, and it arrived last weekend with 32 hours of painful caving in Elk River. After multiple set up trips to load in tanks to the beginning of sump 5 last year it came time to use them. The plan was for three divers (myself, Steve and Ryan) to traverse sump 7 and emerge in the freshly discovered Hall of Crazy Horses on the other side. We would take through an emergency pack of camping gear, a rope for lowering gear down the 10m high waterfall, and a selection of 7L tanks for push diving in sump 8.

I also intended to take the very big camera through and get some great shots in the Hall. After returning from the last exploration dive, Steve reported a massive chamber. I had dismissed some of that as the over-excitement of exploration but I was expecting a moderately sized bit of cave. So when I unpacked the camera at sump 4 to take a few practise shots and discovered it was completely dead, I was more than a bit disappointed. We left the camera at sump 4 and continued onwards and downwards to the sump 5/6/7 complex. Luckily Steve had his GoPro handy so there are a few shots of our adventure. The first shot here is me about to do the first dive in sump 8.

With the camera down for the count I was able to concentrate on completing the survey of the last third of sump 7. We all emerged on the other side with our various loads of gear and headed down into the Hall. As it turned out, Steve hadn’t been exaggerating – it’s big. Ceiling heights are hard to judge without a disto but look to be more than 20m up. At the far end, sump 8 was blue and beckoning. You can see from Steve’s photo above that the bedding plane is angled up. I was hopeful for short and shallow and that’s exactly what we got. Sump 8 turned out to be 20m long and 1.5m deep. I surfaced on the other side to discover another 150m of large streamway passage.

The cave trends back to very tall, narrow rift with similar white-veined black walls to those found before sump 5. The heading continues in a similar direction. After some nice walking passage the stream descends into sump 9. We had to go back to the end of sump 7 to pick up the rest of the exploration tanks. From there it was an hour down to the start of sump 9 where we inserted Steve and sat down to wait. Ten minutes later Ryan and I could hear a “coooo-eeeee” over the top of the sump – there’s a high and dry connection somewhere up in the distant ceiling. Sump 9 is 50m long and there are a couple of options for the way on from there.

We were out of time. After leaving the mostly-full exploration tanks in situ at sump 8, we headed back into sump 7. Two and a half hours of diving and caving saw us at cave camp in the early hours of the morning. A short and refreshing sleep almost made up for having to pull my wet and cold wetsuit back on later that morning. By midday we had made contact with the dry support crew and shortly after 4pm we were back on the surface to see the end of a hot and sunny day. The survey data is being processed and I’m looking forward to some big changes to the end of the map. Now all we have to do is another three load-out and supply-in trips, and then we can get back to those exploration tanks and the challenge of sump 10.

Both photos here are by Steve Fordyce.

I know I’ve skipped a couple of trips on here, including some nice photos from Scrubby Creek and Shade of Death. However the excitement of the Elk push dives this weekend is going to post first and I will have to get back to the Scrubby Creek shots for you at a later date. The Elk project has been going on for just over two years now and it seems that at times we’ve been making a lot of effort for very little progress. This weekend we put in a lot of effort and got great new cave in return.

It was a three day weekend in Victoria so we planned for an easy day Saturday, a downstream push on Sunday and then a clean up day on Monday. The proposal for the “easy day” was to carry in the gear in preparation for Sunday and then go and have a quick look at the upstream sumps. I hadn’t previously dived upstream and from descriptions it sounded both relatively short and had stalactites. This was a good enough reason to drag the real camera through for some piccies without the pain of taking it downstream.

The three of us headed upstream together. I was only using 3L tanks while Ken and Steve were on 7Ls and 5Ls respectively. The low, flat, shallow passage took some difficult manoeuvring of the camera and I was glad not to be lumping large tanks as well. The photos from here are deceptive – while the water was clear, it was only clear very briefly. Even the ripples from our movement through the water would disturb the silt on the walls ahead of us. As I turned to take photos of Ken I was looking at the camera through a cloud of silt. In most cases I was shooting blind and hoping there was clear water in front of the dome.

The shimmering “surface” above in the top photo is also a lie as you can see by the angle of Ken’s head. In most cases this is less than an inch of air pooled against the roof. I was relatively buoyant and none of us was wearing fins, so it wasn’t the most elegant progression down the passage. After the first short sump and a second long sump we reached an airspace with some nice decorations. I dropped my tanks and we had a short photo session before I left Ken and Steve to continue into the third sump.

As it turned out I should have continued, because they reached the end of the line and then the end of the cave very shortly after. The upstream low flat passage turned into a series of rimstone pools progressing upwards. After some difficult wriggling over limestone they emerged into a large aven with an estimated 7m height. The water in the passage was coming from a hole about half way up the aven in a waterfall. With sheer sides getting up there is going to be a bit of a mission so they surveyed their way home. The discovery is interesting because we’re not aware of any surface features in that area that may correspond to the aven underground.

It was a slightly longer day than anticipated but we were still back at Homeleigh by 9pm. On Sunday morning we were getting changed at the Potholes Carpark when we took a short break to corral three escapee horses back into a paddock. After that excitement we were in the cave by 10.30am and headed straight for the end. For this trip we were carrying two 9L carbon fibre tanks and I had the small camera. The intention was to put Steve in sump 7 with the two 7L steel tanks that were already in the cave. We also carried in another 6 lumps of lead to weigh the carbon fibre tanks down with.

Along the way we dropped two of Ken Smith’s famous pingers into sumps 3 and 4. The one in sump 3 was located by the dry support team and found to be within 2m of the estimated surveyed location, which is a great credit to the survey work done by those who came before and Peter’s mapping work. The pinger in sump 4 was sitting under 115m of rock cover and very close to the fenceline around the Potholes Reserve. The rock depth at the edge of pinging range and the electric fenceline interference made detection impossible, so we were unable to confirm the position of sump 4 against the survey.

The trip was uneventful and after spending five very chilly hours shivering at the edge of sump 5 I watched Steve re-emerge triumphant. After laying a further 110m of line underwater he surfaced into a small chamber. Crawling forward wearing four tanks, the small chamber became a very large chamber. Steve ditched the tanks and headed forward to explore and survey. Several waterfalls to be down climbed indicate that sump 7 is still perched and not yet at the level of the Murrindal River. The estimated drop across the chamber is 20m. At the far end there was a small pool which presumably leads into sump 8.

With time ticking by Steve surveyed the chamber to reveal a total length of 145m. He then headed out and the three of us carried four tanks back to Uncle’s Aven, to emerge at 2.30am. With our adventurous morning persuading horses off the highway the chamber has been named The Hall of the Crazy Horse. And now we have some time to plan the next expedition and work out how we’re going to get multiple people through sump 7 to support a dive into sump 8. Huge thanks to all of those who helped out both this weekend and along the way so far. Without a very large number of helping hands these push dives would be impossible and your help is deeply appreciated.

We were back in Elk River cave on the weekend, once again searching for a way on and through the current final sump. Over the last year or so we’ve laid 250m of line into sump 7 over several push dives. To achieve those dives there have been 15 trips into the cave – to survey, photography, resupply and explore. As the end of the sump got further and further away the dive required larger and larger tanks. This means each push dive trip requires two or three resupply and stocking trips to carry tanks to the end. One of those was just a month ago, where we carried “normal” sized tanks into the cave. Normal-sized for regular side mounted cave diving in Mt Gambier that is, where you can back the car up to the stairs and stroll down to the water. When I consider the trip from the car to sump 7, 12L steels no longer look normal sized – they look massive.

The last trip on which we carried two 12Ls and one 7L didn’t involve diving at the end and was relatively efficient. This weekend just passed we took advantage of having all the tanks at the end and romped in with (almost) empty hands.  The early sumps had been crystal clear and with my little compact Lumix I tried to capture a few shots on the way in. The Lumix can take acceptable caving shots under the right conditions, but underwater images really show why it’s worth lumping the dSLR around. At sump 5 Tim and I geared up. Tim took two 12Ls and I rigged up three 7L tanks. I was very happy to have my new LTZ harness from DiveRite. I used it to carry my 3L tanks on the way in very comfortably and without getting stuck in any of the dry restrictions. Once at the final sump 35lbs of lift meant I could be neutral in my wetsuit and three full steel tanks, rather than bouncing along the bottom.

Tim and I progressed through sumps 5 and 6 in clear water, and swam down through the inevitable silt out at the start of sump 7. The silt is created as the divers walk across from the end of sump 6 and is unavoidable. Once through the cloud and about 20m down the line into sump 7 it usually clears up. I was following Tim so wasn’t all that surprised that the vis stayed poor – bubbles hitting the ceiling and the tiniest motion near the walls are enough to cause a silt out in Elk River. As we swam into some larger passage I became less sure about the water clarity. And then we followed the line up into the first air bell and the top 2m of water were crystal clear. At this point I realised that the milky, cloudy water wasn’t being caused by us. The silt was evenly distributed through the water throughout the sump. It did make it difficult to see the way on and as I bumped my way along the line I wondered how much further we would get with exploration.

The first photo above is in fact not a photo, but a screen capture from the GoPro which was on my hand (thanks Bradley!). It shows Tim on the way in, reel stowed for travel, descending from the small patch of clear water and back into the murk. We progressed to the end of the line and I slowed in a couple of spots along the way to fix tie-offs and add a few more silt stakes. Unfortunately Tim had some difficulties with line management in challenging conditions, and after attempting to get the new reel and old line working together, we decided to turn for home. The length of the sump and the restrictions along the way make for a slow trip to the end. Even with the very large (or normal-sized, depending on your point of view) tanks there is limited time available to make progress. Small difficulties are enough to mean it’s time to turn for home and try again another day. So, we’re up for a few more resupply trips to get some more tanks into the cave and set ourselves up for another go.

After a trip over to Eurotek to talk about Elk River, and a couple of cancelled trips where for various reasons we didn’t get in the cave, it felt like it was time to go caving rather than talk about it. Our last trip into the cave was a push trip back in winter, where high water levels led to a sporting trip home back up the waterfalls. Steve and I laid some line and we also used a lot of tanks. Too many to carry out in one go – some of those empties were still in the cave. So this trip was to both retrieve the empties and replace them with full tanks for next month’s push trip.

As you can see from my choice of lead photo, the most exciting this about this trip was the time it took. After a good start into the cave just before 9am we made excellent time down to Uncle’s Aven. Getting changed from dry caving gear to wet caving gear is still the slowest part of the trip, but even that took less than an hour. We headed into sump 1 with two 12L tanks and a 7L in tow, and off down the cave. The above picture was taken after Tim and I identified the empty tanks in the cache at the end and bagged them up for exit. Turnaround time at just 2pm! Exciting stuff.

We know that the time sinks on our Elk runs are the periods of changing gear rather than the periods of moving through the cave. This trip was definitely helped by not having to change from sump diving gear to cave diving gear and large tanks at the end (and back again). Not having to sit around for 90 minutes while push divers work their way through sumps 5, 6 and 7 helped us out too. The photos show the big camera was left at home in favour of the pocket-able Lumix. And 14 trips over the last year and a half mean we’re all pretty familiar with the best track down the streamway.

It was great to be back at Homeleigh at a reasonable hour and to relax in the prospect of not having to go back in Baby Berger on Sunday morning to fetch the rest of the gear. The next trip will be another resupply, and then a push dive…fingers crossed for sump 7 finally coming up into some dry space.

If you happen to be in the area, come and say hi…I look forward to seeing you there!