Kohatu and beyond

New Year’s Day 2019. What to do on a lovely West Coast afternoon but go caving of course. Arvid, Gavin, Guy and I had been into Fox River on the Sunday prior and taken the usual beating that is on offer there. As we parted company that evening (just before midnight) we speculated on the idea of visiting Babylon after a rest day. 

 

          Driving up the main street of Westport whilst at work on the Monday I spied Guy taking a seat with a cuppa tea outside a local café. So I swung by and delivered the bad news that DoC had shut up shop and we were thus unable to collect a key to the gate in Babylon. I was thinking that a nice stroll down one of the streams up on Denniston might be in order, but Guy and Gavin were adamant that caving was the only conceivable option. After discussing my meagre offering of possibilities and current projects and not liking any of them, I remembered that Lindsay had wanted one last passage in Kohatu surveyed. That seemed to tick the Capital boxes.

A clean Guy

          Having procured a map of Kohatu, with said to-be-surveyed passage sketched in, I then phoned Kerry for any other last minute ideas. And in the end we hatched a marvellous plan of attack. We would find and then explore (and maybe even map) a cave which has evaded my three previous attempts to locate (I blame bad beta) and then after lunch descend into the muddy slime hole that bears the name Kohatu.

Work in progress sketch of Hole in the Cliff

Map of Kohatu thus far

          And so it was that not more than a handful of minutes late I was on my way out to Charleston for a 9 o’clock rendezvous. That became 10 o’clock by the time the boys had made their lunches and then 11 o’clock by the time a coffee-to-go at the local Underworld Adventures café became a sit-down-and-sup deal. Then came the succession of locals whom one knew that had to be greeted in the proper festive manner and then came the tourists on the one lane road all of whom needed to be greeted with an appropriate powhiri. It was well gone 12 o’clock by the time we hauled to at the Hollywood carpark.

Hanging flowstone floor over stals

          Being in holiday mode it seemed only right and proper to do a little light track work on our way to the ‘Hole in the Cliff’ cave that was our first target. It won’t take a lot more effort along that track now before it’s wheelchair access standard…

Finally – with improved beta – I located the aforementioned cave and after a quick snack we were off underground. I sketched as we went, Guy pushed the squeezes and Gavin climbed the climbs. While it is only a small system it does warrant a visit and it will be well up on my list of caves to take newbies to.

Stal with a story to tell

          We tumbled back down the hill to the Makirikiri Stream and found an idyllic lunching spot on a flat dry rock in the middle of the stream. Soon enough we were taking mini-sips from a scalding mug of Gavin-coffee and basking in the warmth and glory of the Buller sunshine. With playtime over it was down to work. 

We look dirty but compared to after Kohatu we're clean as!

          From where we had stopped for lunch a strong arm could have comfortably heaved a stone to both the cave we’d just come from and the one we were now headed for. Thus it was that barely had we packed up our lunchboxes than we were unpacking the ropes and donning our dangle-lies and jingle-lies.

Having completely forgotten how long a rope was required for the entrance series we had brought a 50m. A true and actual 50m as Gavin said, not the usual nominal 50m that is generally closer to 46m or less. I gallantly suggested that the first section didn’t really need a rope, but that as a back-up anchor we might as well sling the end around a stout branch while we here. Not likely, the entrance definitely does need a rope. 

Stals from Hole in the Cliff

Anyways, down I slide hunting about for the twin bolts, which were further on than I had remembered. Throw the rope down, pull it back up, tie a knot in the end, throw the rope down again, it seemed to reach the steeply sloping floor easily enough. Thence to the knot tying. A figure of eight on a bight and an alpine butterfly I can manage and arranging them such that the weight going down runs through the butterfly I can also manage. But then I got stuck on figuring out which way the knots should be placed on the offset bolts. I put the butterfly on the higher ‘inner’ bolt and then tried it on the lower ‘outer’ one and swapped them back and forth at least three more times. 

Stal with new lease of life

Finally I settled on the former method and figured that while it was vastly short of beautiful it would at least be sufficiently safe. I slapped in a couple of cows-tails and brought my rack down, then immediately prior to launching I glanced down and noticed the end of the rope swinging 2-3 metres above the floor. Blast. Re-secure, feed most of the re-belay loop into and through the anchor-knots and finally the end-knot looked like it might be getting close enough to the bottom. While the rope didn’t stretch much (of course), taking the lock off the rack gave me the last few inches I needed to feel good about descending.

Sand in-fill

On the one hand you could say Kohatu was easy, it was certainly straight-forward enough. On the other hand you could equally truthfully say it was a nightmare, crawling on our bellies through metre after metre of clinging, gloopy mud and right where the crawl was at its tightest – a pool of unavoidable water.

Who said caving was the only conceivable option, a walk down a sunny stream bed full of giant boulders was sounding pretty good to me.

 

Guy

          Having located (at long last) the passage beyond which lay our survey target, we were now dangerously low on vim and very nearly fresh out of vigour. We elected to poke our noses in and defer for a moment the decision to survey. Back down to a belly crawl and again just where the crawl was at its tightest the stream banks faded away leaving us with nothing but frigid running water to immerse ourselves in. Yes, the passage did open up somewhat further on, however after what was possibly the shortest mid-cave conference yet, we decided to not survey. Warm sunshine beckoned us from the world above, beersies softly called our names, and visions of clean overalls wafted before us.

Gavin

          And so we crawled and grovelled and then (just for a change) crawled some more all the long tedious way back we had come. Upon meeting the greenery of the entrance the sultry residual heat of the day rushed to embrace us, it seeped in through our filthy overalls and into our refrigerated bones and was good. In a celebration of all things good; life, warmth, meal plans, supplies of beersies and simply not being stuck a tight squeeze full of sloppy mud anymore, we cut some more of the track on the way back to the carpark. And thus ended our New Years commemorations. Til next time boys!