Blackwater Rafting

A Kiwi Adventure

“If you want to go on this adventure, you have to jump into the water holding an inner tube, backward, AND you have to put your hand in a jar, and pull out a cave weta.”

I used to race land yachts, a sport that created the opportunity for me to gain experience in the world of sports journalism, successfully working with the news media, TV, and seeking sponsorship from large corporates.

Land yachting is an exciting sport, where even with a 5 square meter sail, my little yacht could sail as fast as 100 kph in 15 knots of wind. I was only inches above the ground, which varied from grass inside the Avondale race course, runways at air force bases, and beaches, where at low tide the front wheel would spray a green mixture of black iron-sand, gloop, and algae straight into my face. Thank goodness for tearaways on my goggles!

This terrible shaky video footage shows me (Daddy) racing on 90 Mile Beach in Northland, New Zealand. I was clocked at over 100 kph, and for most of the exhilarating run, I was verging on out of control.

More on that trip another day as it would have ramifications for me in the future. I began a successful journey with the news media when our club, of which I was president at the time, decided to send a team to the Nevada Desert to compete in the America’s Cup of Landyachting.

Our New Zealand team won that trophy and the world speed record for a wind-powered craft on land. Just recently Team Emiritz New Zealand smashed that. Reaching 222.4 kph on a land yacht, if you will pardon a yachting pun!

Land yachting would change the world of sailing on the sea as well, with ‘Dirty’ Dennis Connor who had the audacity to compete against New Zealand in the America’s Cup with a catamaran, featuring a wing mast. All the larger classes of land yachts in the 90s featured wing masts.

We would have many successes in the America’s Cup and these, of course, had musical themes. One that sings to the hearts of Kiwis is Dave Dobbyn and Loyal.

The catamarans and wing masts would later evolve into foiling in the America’s Cup and also the Sail GP, which just had its second to last event of the 3rd season, where 9 yachts, on and above the water, raced at several times the wind speed. The Kiwis came second in the grand final but won the local series on points.

Anyway, let’s move to something more sedate. How is it related to land yachting? Sometimes as a club, we would go do something different, and one of these was a trip to the famous Waitomo Caves. Note to self to share the story of the haunted room at the Waitomo Hotel.

Most people go to Waitomo for a calm boat ride to underground caves, where if everyone is nice and quiet you can see huge numbers of glow worms. I have a photo in one of my albums of my grandparents carefully boarding one of the boats. But there are other activities too. One combines abseiling 328 feet down into a set of caves and then you hike your way out through the caves. Another activity, which we did on this day trip, is blackwater rafting.

What is that? It’s basically going underground, climbing and crawling through cave crevices, and eventually floating through huge underwater caverns on a large innertube, looking up at glow worms that light up the ceiling.

On arrival, the first thing we had to do was don wetsuits, because the water is absolutely freezing. Then we each grabbed an innertube and formed a train. I’m the second person in this lineup. (I had hair back then). In the last section of the adventure, we were going to lie back on the tube, resting our feet on the tube of the person in front. This was the training. We would then have a leisurely ride in pitch-black darkness, and if we could keep quiet, we would enjoy a unique display from the glow worms, not dissimilar to being out at night in the countryside, looking up at stars in the Milky Way.

We had to do a test first, which was to hold on to the tube as if we were sitting on it, and jump backward about 4 meters down into a slow moving ‘river’. If you were afraid to do that, you couldn’t go, for reasons that would become apparent. We were then parted from the tubes.

The next step was crawling through some very tight crevices for maybe 10 meters into the first cave, with the lamps on our helmets to guide the way. No room for claustrophobics, or much of anything else. We stopped there, and our guide told us that while all we could see was rocks and water, the caves are well populated with wildlife. A common inhabitant is the cave weta.

Our next step to prove we were worthy of this adventure was to put our hand in a jar which was passed around from one to the other of us, in the dark, with all of our helmets lights out, and pull a cave weta out of the jar.

Who was going to go first? I wish it was me, but I was about 3rd. We all made appropriate noises to scare our friends, as we put our hands in the jar and pulled out………….. something unexpected.

Phew, but they had us going!

We spent quite some time crawling through caves, seeing stalactites and stalagmites. We slid down underground waterfalls through water warn shelves. We took turns climbing into a vent, where the water was blasting upwards, and we had to try to get our heads under the water, which was trying to blast us back out.

We walked through some amazing caves, like this one with a photo borrowed from the Waitomo Caves website.

And then we were reunited with our inner tubes. We had to turn the lights out, and we found out why we had to do that backward jump back out in the open before we started our journey. We walked through an area like the one in the picture above, but in the dark. It led to a ledge, where each of us had to jump back into a deep pool, holding our inner tubes, having absolutely no perception of how far the drop was.

We then drifted into another cavern and were allowed our lights on to form the train for the grand finale. A quiet easy glide on our tubes, to enjoy the light show.

Unfortunately one of our team, who had done really well until then, really struggled with his balance in the dark. The train would only work if we all relaxed and stayed in position as we had practiced before we started our journey. He started rolling from side to side and pulled the people in front and behind him into the water.

We tried a couple more times with the same result, and the glowworms’ lights faded to darkness. Eventually, we agreed that he would have a solo carriage on the train and the rest of us would continue as planned. We got to see some lights and had something to laugh over, as we had lunch and a beer after we had removed our wetsuits, showered, and got warm again.

If you haven’t been black water rafting, don’t be put off by the name. As long as you follow instructions and are not too claustrophobic, it is a fun adventure. For more information, check out this link.