raggles.kiwi

Te Tahi, Wriggly Snake, Te Ana Puta

Three of us set off to Charleston once again for another fun weekend of caving. We had the clubs newest member with us going on his first proper caving trip, bringing with him bucket loads of enthusiasm. On Saturday morning we left the CCB and headed for the abseil entrance to Te Tahi. Before we went down we did a quick trip to the walk in entrance to the Iron Room with all its spectacular stals, which was a great warm up.

The abseil tomo is truly spectacular, almost perfectly round and very beautiful. The trip through the cave was straightforward, I spotted one elver in the streamway, and several cave wetas. We did a side trip to the whale bone, where one of us found the limits of his comfortableness with tight spaces.

A relatively dry exit down the rebirth canal saw us back into the sunshine and back to the road. After washing our gear and discovering that we had quite a bit of extra time in the day, we decided to see if we could find Wriggly Snake. None of us had been there before but I knew roughly where it was so after 15 minutes of rummaging we found it! Not having a map we just explored as much passage as we could find - unfortunately the main rift was much too tight for comfort for one of us, so he headed back to the entrance whilst we had a look round some more. It is quite an interesting cave and I would very much like to return to see how far the main rift goes. We took the opportunity to go for a walk to the hole in the hill before we went home. This is a fantastic limestone arch with a stream flowing though it, well worth a look. To top the day off we did a couple of trips up the SRT tree and watched the sun go down on the beach with a couple of tasty beverages.

Sundays mission was to try and find (the tricky part) and then explore Te Ana Puta sea cave at Point Elizabeth. After a 75m(ish) bash through dense flax we did manage to find a promising (though small) looking hole in the ground. We thought it was the correct entrance but it became obvious after it closed down 20 minutes later that we were not in the right place. We moved 30m and found another hole with flagging around it which was the entrance we were looking for. It turned out to be a very interesting cave, but unfortunately the map was left behind so we were once again exploring all leads we could find. Sadly after 2 hours we had exhausted all the cave we could find and we weren't able to find our way to the main passages - it turned out that there was a tiny passage right near the entrance that we had somehow missed! I will definitely be going back to explore the rest of this cave!