Entertaining Tourists

I guess this story comes as a post script to the recent Caving AGM. Having met the odd nice person and the nice odd one there, it was inevitable that there would be a sporadic exchange of phone numbers. I’ve learned never to expect too much of these contacts, people get busy and life goes on. However in this case I received a txt a week or so later from one keen Swedish individual.

Gearing up

 

Dipping our toes

  

Checking a rapid

He suggested that he would be travelling down my way in the near future and that he would be interested in taking in some of the local sights, or should that be sites? When I asked what he would most like to do and he replied that he found it best when his guides chose to share the things that they were most interested in. Well, that got me thinking. There’s lots on the Coast that I like doing and I soon had a list nearly as long as my arm and stretching across half a dozen disciplines.

In with a splash

 

Delicate negotiations

 

Chuting through

As the time neared, Ola the Swede suggested he would be staying a week and bringing a female friend; even better. By the time they actually arrived his 'female' friend had grown a beard and we were down to four days. I took up my whiteboard marker, slowly selected 2/3’s of the To Do list and tearfully kissed them goodbye.

Short Breather

In a Sea of Bubbles

Bombs away

I had for some time been wanting to canyon the Tiropahi again, and believing it to be one the gems of sporting activities on the Coast put it up for Day One. As it transpired the bearded friend, Philipp, had just completed a canyoning training course and was looking to make a start in the industry of canyon guiding. Just as well we’ll have someone with us who knows something!

Rope work

Note the mistake

Draining my bag

The weather was idyllic and water levels had not fallen off too much since our last rain which was just what I had been hoping for. On my previous trip the water had been at an all-time low and had we ended up doing unconscionably too much walking. 

Where Angels fear to Rap

Ola's Way

This time around things played out quite differently. Our overall approach to the challenges presented to us throughout the day was markedly more circumspect than with my first team. Yet somehow we also pushed harder, taking the time to check for underwater obstacles in more daring plunges and then launching ourselves at them, repeatedly if they were worthwhile. We got a lot more swimming in this time round which was great fun.

Bubbles Galore

Flying Leap

The waterfall pitch proved its usual nail-biting self and in the end we swapped to the true left for our descent. How we didn’t lose Philipp over the edge in the swift-tugging current as he blithely leap toward the opposite bank I’ll never know. It was a stop-mid-step and gawp helplessly kinda of moment. 

Boys on the Move

On the Edge

 

Assessing the rope length

The pitch is reckoned at a good 30m and we had bought only one 50m rope with us with some light unrated cord for a potential pull-down option. We threaded the rope up as a double on an Italian hitch for adjustability, then carefully spent an age pre-ordaining sign-language signals for all conceivable eventualities before sending Ola out to the final edge some 5-6m below us. 
 

I'm pointing at Ola on the far side of the pool, you can barely see him

Philipp tells me I'm good to go, or something anyway...

Already drowned out of earshot, his job was to assess how much extra rope he needed to get down and signal us accordingly. Once we had the magic number Philipp then paid out the extra through the Italian hitch and Ola promptly disappeared from sight. Philipp and I waited nervously knowing there was the possibility of an error in the maths that would leave Ola stranded neither half way up nor half way down. 
 

Water Falling

 

Philipp appears over the upper edge of the waterfall

All Smiles

However we soon saw the rope go slack and shortly after Ola swam out from under the waterfall and made his way to the opposite side of the pool. I hadn’t told them that the pool is infested with some of largest eels in New Zealand, with a reputation for being hungry monsters who enjoy nothing better than taste-testing idle intruders. Once there he started to wave his arms in an unorthodox manner with a signal that had not been in our pre-arranged vocabulary. Clearly he had thought of something else. After a little head-scratching we realised that he was suggesting that the rope was in fact long enough just as a straight double. So nervously we hauled the rope back to the centre and I set off to see if he was correct. No worries! It turns out that the waterfall is only about 24.5m (as measured on a dynamic rope).
 

Wet butt, happy

Low Water Action

I held off from dropping into the pool and clawed my way onto a nearby perch to film Philipp’s descent. The rocks were incredibly slippery, skulking off to the side of the waterfall as they were. It was one of those lemon moments that could have easily gone from a simple slip to non-viable conclusion within a finger-snap. Worse luck I ended up with an enormous water-droplet right in the centre of my lens just as Philipp hove into view. Crud.
 

Spa Time

Last Gasp

All up we were about 3 hours down the canyon, half hour for lunch and a further half hour back to the road. Easy.
 

Wall of Water

Day two. Lindsay was over and planning to push Golf Course into the next dimension. I thought a little extra man-power wouldn’t go amiss and that the boys would probably like the cave anyway. We spent the day in some of the most, no, actually they were the most appallingly tight bedding planes I’ve ever had the displeasure of nudging. We squirmed like little flat-worms at the main entrance, we shoved like brave little Indian’s at the second stream-way and we dug fiendishly with our stone-age tools at in-fill in a couple of places. Nothing budged an iota for us. In the end the boys tottled off to explore the cave by themselves and may in fact be the first people to completely cover the two main stream-ways in one trip.

My plan had been to go climbing on the Charleston sea-cliffs for Day Three, but the weather forecast conspired against us. Thus the lot fell to Te Tahi Cave. Allow a couple of hours for the through trip, was the prevailing wisdom. Funny. Not with these boys, every single (ok, nearly every single) lead on the map and off it had to be explored. The Iron Room, the upstream resurgence, the bypass loop out of there, the stream-way squeezes and backwards through the stream-way bypass. Up to the Hi Hi tomo from the Y-junction (fun going up the handline backwards without SRT). The upper levels at the tomo. The 11m waterfall (and that without using the upper levels, now that’s squeezy!), and an awful lot of the down-stream bedding planes (although some of that could be attributed to my non-nav skills). Of course the whale skeleton, but then also the second skeleton upstream from there. The Ha Ha tomo exit (albeit unsuccessfully) before finally spilling into the warm sunshine and a very welcome wash in the Nile River.

It has to be said that these boys do like caving so instead to rock climbing on Day four, now that the forecast was clear, they decided Fox River Cave was for them. I was feeling a bit off-colour (and consequently came down with a bug for 3 days) so I declined to join them. We tried desperately to find a third caver for the party, but such resources are scant hereabouts and in the end they went by themselves - with a little rigging heads-up from Mira and the suggestion from Lindsay that they allow 14 hours for the trip. At 11 o’clock that night, 14 hours after starting they txt me that next night to say all was well and to ‘disarm’ the alarm that had been set for them at midnight.

Crazy kids.

I gather they continued south from here to climb Mt Cook the next day


I've uploaded a couple of clips of the canyoning trip which can be viewed at...
Starting off
Waterfall