PESH 2015 – Diving Red Ball Canyon Sump Part II

 Cave diving, Caving, Overseas  1 Response »
May 052015
 
PESH 2015 - Diving Red Ball Canyon Sump Part II

In Part I I talked about the Huautla System, the trip into the San Agustin entrance and the first dives of Red Ball Canyon sump. So now we were past the two short sumps and into the expected dry cave behind. The cave was heading away upstream and while climbs were expected, the assumption was that the gradient would be relatively flat and the lead would eventually join up with another known cave system kilometres away. The next underground morning, Dave, Sandy and Andreas headed off to Red Ball Canyon to ferry three divers through sumps 1 and 2 with two sets of dive gear. They took a dry bag of drill and batteries, rigging bolts and rope with intentions [read more…]

PESH 2015 – diving Red Ball Canyon Part I

 Cave diving, Caving, Overseas  2 Responses »
May 022015
 
PESH 2015 - diving Red Ball Canyon Part I

After crossing the world twice and two weeks of hard work, I’m back from the wilds of the Mexican mountains. This trip report is long enough that I have split it in half. Stay tuned next week for part 2. The PESH 2015 expedition is now complete with the two main cave entrances used de-rigged and returned to their natural state. 2015 was the second annual expedition with trips planned each April until 2023. Over the course of 10 years the PESH team aims to expand the known depth of the Huautla System beyond a mile, and the surveyed horizontal passage to over 100kms. This year’s expedition cracked the 70km mark and with the total depth at 1545m, a mile can’t [read more…]

Preparing for Huautla

 Cave diving, Caving, Overseas  No Responses »
Apr 072015
 

Life has been a little bit quiet on the website of late, because life has been incredibly busy in the real world. Since our last successful exploration weekend in Elk River I’ve spoken at Oztek, done a couple of lovely ocean dives, a weekend in Gambier and packed three overstuffed bags for Mexico. I fly out of Melbourne next weekend for two weeks of caving, diving and exploration with the PESH (Proyecto Espeleologico Sistema Huautla) expedition. The PESH mission is to run ten annual expeditions to the Huautla System. This April is the second one and continues on with the aims of pushing the known cave past 100kms in length and one mile in depth. There are more than two dozen [read more…]

Pushing upstream and downstream Elk River

 Cave diving, Caving, Victoria  2 Responses »
Mar 092015
 
Pushing upstream and downstream Elk River

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 [read more…]

Surveying in DD31

 Caving  1 Response »
Jan 282015
 
Surveying in DD31

About the cave DD31 aka Swain’s Cave was discovered and first entered in 2012. It extends to over 2.4kms of streamway passage leading to a terminal sump shortly before the expected resurgence on the surface. The entrance is in the same doline as DD4 Jones Ridge Cave which has been known for decades but this little gem didn’t reveal itself until very recently. Combined, the tunnels in DD4 and DD31 add up to over 5kms of passage. I had caved in DD4 previously when we inserted Harry into the terminal upstream sump and I was excited to have a look at the downstream half of the system. About the trip The first thing that struck me about DD31 was that [read more…]

Merry Christmas!

 Cave diving, Caving, Ocean diving, Reef diving, rEvo, Tasmania  No Responses »
Dec 232014
 

It doesn’t quite feel like the end of 2014, but apparently it really is. I’ve had an amazing year with some fantastic diving – from muddy sumps in Elk River and Tasmania to crystal clear tropical water in Komodo to secret caves in Indonesia and scalloped rocks in France. For Christmas I’m headed back to the tropics. Tomorrow I head off to Bali to complete my MOD2 and MOD3 rEvo courses with Marc Crane at Tek Deep Asia. I was very happy with the rigour and detail of my MOD1 course back in 2012 and with a few hours under my belt, these courses seem to be a fitting way to end 2014. All going well I will be surfacing [read more…]

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