Crawlways through Niggle Cave

About the site

Niggle Cave is located near the Camooweal township, about 25kms from Great Nowranie. While I jumped straight into telling you about the diving in Great Nowranie first, here I figured I’d better explain the “getting to the water” part first. Niggle Cave would have to be one of the more difficult cave accesses I’ve negotiated, and this is coming from someone who trudged 1.3kms through the bush with twin 12L steel tanks.

From the surface, the doline is deceptively small. After you squat down in this shoulder-width hole, you clip into the rope and attempt to manoeuvre through a tight restriction. It’s much easier to get through with your arms above your head, but of course you need at least one hand on the rope to belay down with. This very small hole opens out into a 50m pitch down a huge vertical fissure. Getting in is fun, and trying to SRT out up a rope through a restriction is even more fun.

Pitch negotiated, and after a very short walk, the cave lowers into crawlways. While we had timed the weather appropriately and the crawlways were mostly dry, they weren’t fun. I started counting, where one crawlway ended in the first space you could stand up straight in. By this method there were an even dozen, of which most were sand, the long one was an army crawl through very wet mud, and two were painful pebbles. All of this would have been quite enjoyable for a quick trip through with headtorch and overalls…of course, divers need a few more toys than that. In a team of three we humped tanks and caving bags and ourselves through crawlway after crawlway after crawlway.

About the photo

Previous dive trips here haven’t been very successful, with wet conditions in the cave making crawling more difficult than it needed to be. Paul has also visited here before and, expecting poor conditions, trekked in for a quick look at the water without any dive gear. After viewing the entrance pool in the photo above, he was determined to come back. Once I finally dragged the last bit of dive gear out of the flatteners, I could see why he was so keen.

The photo above was taken from above the entrance pool, with the camera still in the housing to keep the mud out. Despite being a little soft around the edges it shows the tempting double pool with a thin limestone bridge running through the middle. We installed a ladder to provide access down the last 3m drop and geared up…that story is coming, next week.

The second shot is me and my housing, at the fourways junction. The very small entrance restriction meant the protective case for the housing didn’t fit down the hole, so I hand carried the housing through the cave to the water. This shot was taken on the way home with eight crawlways complete and only four to go. Regrettably the next one is the long mud army crawl and the sand had permeated my knee pads and turned the inner surface to sandpaper. It seemed like a good time to stop and take a few photos to capture the moment.