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…]

Rebreathers in the Shaft

 Cave diving, Mt Gambier, rEvo  No Responses »
Feb 102015
 
Rebreathers in the Shaft

The Shaft is a beautiful dive, and an impossible cave to photograph. After I finally achieved that classic shot of the sunbeam down the middle of the hole, rockpile lit up and diver frozen up in the shallows, I declared I never needed to take photographs in there again. And yet, two summers on I was headed over to Gambier with my parents for a fun family weekend with a Shaft booking in place. A couple of weeks beforehand Kelvyn was chatting to the landowners about the long-discussed intent of opening the site up to rebreathers. While there have been “special interest” dives in the Shaft on rebreathers previously regular diving has all been run on open circuit. Letting a [read more…]

Backlit bubbles in Tank Cave

 Cave diving, Mt Gambier, rEvo  No Responses »
Feb 042015
 
Backlit bubbles in Tank Cave

After our very pleasant jaunt through DD31, Moo and I headed over to Tank Cave for the rest of the Australia Day weekend. It was good to see a whole bunch of freshly minted Advanced Cave divers working through their first group dives with enthusiasm. Tim and I left the gold lines to them and headed down the back of the cave. I was on the rEvo but Tim was back on open circuit and carrying a couple of large stages in addition to his sidemounts. The rEvo makes a big difference to photography in Tank, as once I’m in the right spot I can take more than a couple of different angles without worrying about my bubbles disturbing silt [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…]

Elk River push dive

 Cave diving, Caving, Victoria  No Responses »
Dec 022014
 
Elk River push dive

  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 [read more…]

Sunbeams in Sinkholes

 Cave diving, Mt Gambier  No Responses »
Nov 192014
 
Sunbeams in Sinkholes

About the dive Kilsby’s is gorgeous…I’ve been there many, many times and it’s usually great. Then on some occasions it moves from being great to being truly awesome. These photos were taken on one of those days. On this particular weekend the whole cave diving world was booked in to dive Tank Cave. Myself and my parents had three awesome dives at Pics, Pines and Kilsby’s without seeing another soul. The water in both the Cathedral in Pics and in the main cavern of Pines was crystal clear. And then there was Kilsby’s. In early November I wasn’t sure if we’d be seeing much sunlight in the water. But by 9.45am or so the sunlight was just starting to creep off [read more…]

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