raggles.kiwi

Profanity and Golf Course

Recently I went on my first club trip with the Canterbury Caving Group. Caving is something I had been meaning to get myself into for a long time, but for some reason I never made it happen. The itinerary for the weekend was to head up to Reefton and go through a cave called Profanity on Saturday. We would then head to Charleston for the night and go through a cave called Golf Course on the Sunday.

We arrived at Profanity a little before lunchtime, and I wasn't really sure what to expect. I had been through a few caves before, but nothing longer than an hour or two, and nothing that was particularly squeezy. When I saw the cave entrance, I knew that I was in for something a little different. The entrance passage was long, skinny, and reasonably tight but manageable for someone of my size. After climbing a small waterfall, the cave got skinny in the other dimension, with a bit of crawling and wriggling, eventually leading past the alternate exit to the cave (our intended exit) and into the section of the cave known as the maze.

I found the maze fascinating: many perpendicular, very narrow passages intersecting each other but there is only one way through! Luckily we took all the correct turns the first time, and made it to a small lake, maybe 50m long. In a side passage a couple of tyre tubes were located, but only one of them was deemed suitable for floating across the lake. With nobody else keen, I hopped on, and floated the length of lake while the others walked/swam following a fixed hand line. The cave ceiling was reasonably low at this point, and with the lights turned off all the glowworms were visible. It was quite incredible to be floating along an underground lake staring up to all the glowworms on the ceiling like stars in the sky.

At the end of the lake the cave opened up into a large cavern, several tens of metres wide and high. At the end of the cavern, half the group continued on down the very muddy and quite small section that went a little further. Unfortunately we got to a point where we decided we might not get back without a rope, and so turned back. We had intended to exit the cave via a different exit, but found it to be very unstable and filled with rocks, so went back out the same way we had come in.

We stayed at the CCG hut near Charleston on Saturday night, and on Sunday we headed for Golf Course. I was told that it was a notoriously difficult cave to find, and with all the wind fall in the area from recent storms our job was made even more difficult. However our excellent leader and navigator found the way without too much trouble, and after an hour we arrived to an entrance that involved a 10m descent down a chimney type crevasse thing with the aid of a fixed line. I wasn't quite sure of the technique involved in negotiating this feature, but after a demonstration I was good to go! The cave itself was much more pleasant than Profanity to travel through, being a nice shoulder width most of the way and having a nice high ceiling. There are a few ladders at the start of the cave and a short crawlway a quarter of the way along. Numerous holes (the holes of the Golf Course) filled with water and several metres deep kept us on our toes, several of which were only just able to be stepped across or climbed around. We saw several freshwater crayfish that we were careful not to stand on. We came to the other end of the cave, and because of the reported diabolical return access via the bush, we opted to return back the same way. The exit at the other end was quite fun, soloing up the 10m vertical section of limestone chimney to the top. We returned to the start of the track with a round trip time of maybe 5 hours or so.