Caving

By now its pretty clear that every weekend there is some type of  adventure that I have planned and this weekend was no exception.  Now tramping is kinda the normal and road trips are becoming the same... Time to ramp it up a little and go caving.

This is what it looked like:

It was a stormy morning as one cacher slowly eyed the time. 5.30. After a text to another cacher it was confirmed, a trip to squander the Welsh Whaler's loot was set in motion.

Arriving at the location where the Whaler was shot they were soon heading off.  Despite it being many years, the Whaler's poem still rung true.  The two cachers carefully negotiated the bush their reciting the poem.

From one dirty hole to another,
Begin with a thought for your mother.
Look tall and proud -
She stands out from the crowd
And her light guides the way, don’t you love ‘er!

No matter how many times they recited the poem there was only one thing that stood out.  It wasn't long before the cachers found themselves at the opening to 'one dirty hole'.  Equipping themselves with rubber suits they entered the cave.  With mud up to their calves they sloshed deeper in the darkness.  It wasn't long before they found themselves at a small pond.

Time out was taken to inflate the blowup chair.  Drifting across the pond... was quick. The cachers found themselves faced with a muddy climb up to a higher level and what looked like a small lake.  The cachers should have known by now to stop assuming.  A quick drift and again a dead end.  There was enough room however to squeeze a head through and it was so worth it.  The cave opened up and became a tranquil stream.  The cave was extremely full of water and the cachers found themselves swimming deeper and deeper into mother earth.

Just when all hope of finding the stach was up there was a strange structure up ahead.  Could it be.  With joy and elation with cachers raided the stash.  They found a muddy sheet of paper lying in amongst the gold and decided to add their names.




Mud, water, and cold the adventures had a brillant day and wished there was more caches like these around.


This really was the only cache that I was after today and all the rest were just a bonus.

After collecting the Welsh whaler cache we headed off to Limestonehenge-Revisited where I claimed a FTF.  Double bonus

With Waitomo cleared out we headed off to Kekepuku to claim a couple of puzzle caches.  The first was the Locked and Lost cache.  We had quickly grabbed the key to this one with Steve and headed off to unlock the lost cache.


Oh, that is where the fun began.

After reading a couple of the logs we knew ruffly where to start the search.  Checking all the obvious places came up empty so we kept on widening the search.  I was lucky enough to spot a foot print and soon found the cache - no longer lost.

Now id like to say that I only left a small geotrail but well lets just say that C&D left a geohighway as he slid down the bank... apparently he was surveying the soil stability. Im no expert but im guessing it will receive a F. Oh and all this happened no where close to the cache... which made it even funnier

The last cache that was to be collected was the Kekepuku leg burner. It required a rather large hike up lots of steps and then doing some maths.  Well lets just say we did the math over and over again until we got an answer that gave us a GZ that looked close enough. Decided to count again as we walked back down. Redid the math ... again and sure enough the coords looked good enough. Claimed another find.

We carried on collecting the last of the caches up the mountain and returned home at 5:00 - a 12hr day.

AWESOME