Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset It Was Fairly Predictable That Firstly, It Wasn’T Going to Be Easy and Secondly Things Probably Weren’T Going to Go to Plan

Photo by Gavin Newman

It is a well known fact that water and electronics don’t mix. It’s also a well known fact that caves trash nice shiny diving kit – we are talking real caves here not the Florida/Mexico holiday diving variety. So two years ago when I decided to make a film about Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset it was fairly predictable that firstly, it wasn’t going to be easy and secondly things probably weren’t going to go to plan. The idea first reared its head as so often is the case during alcohol-fuelled conversations in the pub. Back in 1985 my good friend Leo Dickinson had made a film about Rob Parker’s attempt to push on beyond Martyn Farr’s limit at the end of Wookey. I knew Rob at the time as we were both members of the South Wales Caving Club, but not well, and so I wasn’t involved in the film. I was only just venturing into the world of cave diving and was concentrating much more on still images than film work. I later got to know both Rob and Leo very well and they became my mentors in their respective areas of expertise. Rob taught me to cave dive, initially to join him and others on an expedition to Northern Spain in 1986. The expedition needed a vehicle to carry all the diving equipment and I owned a Range Rover at the time so I was co-opted onto the team! At the end of Leo’s 1985 film Rob swims off alone into the darkness to try to push the end of the cave and we never see where he actually went. Small underwater video cameras did not exist then, and lights were large and heavy. It simply was not practical for a diver, making what was one of the first sport dives ever on mixed gases, to film himself at the same time. After Rob’s death on a cave dive in the Bahamas my quest began with the simple idea to go and have a look at the end of Wookey for myself. I had no thought that I was going to push it further but I wanted to see where Rob had been and if possible film it so others could see. Talking through the idea with Leo, he suggested that we re-edit his old film, adding in footage of the end of the cave and making it into a tribute to Rob, as in spite of several attempts no-one had since managed to push the cave any further. In fact due to the changing nature of the gravel choke at the end of the cave, no- one had even reached Rob’s line reel which, like Martyn’s before him, remained buried somewhere in the gravel. So the idea was born that I would try to get footage from as deep a point at the end of the cave as I could and re-edit it into Leo’s old film. That at least was the plan but plans have a habit of developing… Before going to the end of the cave I needed to refine all the filming equipment that I would use so I started by filming in the easily dived sumps leading from the end of the show cave. The summer of 2001 was unusually dry and it was also during the foot and mouth crisis that closed many of the caves on the hills above Wookey. Whether the lack of cavers in the feeder caves made the difference is hard to tell, but the visibility in the cave during those few months was extraordinary. It 321 WOOKEY HOLE - 75 YEARS OF CAVE DIVING & EXPLORATION

very quickly became apparent that with the combination of the fantastic conditions and modern video equipment we were getting footage far better than anything in the earlier film. I soon decided to reverse the plan and make my own film that would include footage from Leo’s film. It was a daunting prospect. I was a professional cameraman and stills photographer but all my filming work had been done for other people’s productions, I just shot what they asked me to shoot. My cave diving work was almost entirely based around stills photography and apart from small projects at college, I had never made my own film. Not being made as a commission, the film had no budget, but fortunately many of the Somerset cave diving community rallied round and gave an extraordinary amount of help without which the project would have never even got started. This was not going to be an exploration cave diving film as there was apparently nothing left to explore in Wookey, but I wanted to make a film that would appeal to a wide audience and maybe try to explain why people go cave diving, as well as showing as best as I could the spectacular cave that lies beyond the show cave. I approached the owners of Wookey Hole Caves who were very supportive and gave us unlimited access to the caves and, with the full support of the Cave Diving Group, the project was underway. I had decided to base the story around the exploration of the caves right from the earliest cave men through to Rob’s exploration and my attempt to film where he had been. The trouble with cave diving is that it is not a great spectator sport – in order to engage with the audience, I decided to use a presenter. Not a super-hard cave diver, but someone who could experience the cave for the first time and convey their own feelings and emotions on a level that the audience would relate to. This was going to be a difficult balancing act; to find someone experienced enough to be safe in the environment and happy to make the dives, but Fig. 27.1 Mike Thomas, also sufficiently unfamiliar with conditions at Wookey Hole to be able to Chamber 24. convey those experiences to the audience. Film Still by Gavin Newman Roger Whitehead was a diver I had met a couple of years earlier whilst filming sharks in Africa, a safe competent diver who had done a certain amount of caving and continental cave diving but never anything like Wookey. British, but now living permanently in the US where he’s a lecturer in psychology at Denver University, I hoped that his academic background would bring an interesting angle to the question – why explore caves? I approached Roger and he agreed to take on the role of presenter – although he was obviously nervous about the dives involved. Meanwhile filming began in earnest, working most weekends throughout the summer to fit in with work commitments and the availability of assisting divers both in front of and behind the camera. Because of his own commitments Roger was only available for a three- week period, so we had to shoot much of the background material without him – that meant filming most of the big scenic sections of the cave and then inter-cutting Roger’s sequences later. It has often been a feature of cave films that they are not filmed where they say they are. To make filming easier, locations are substituted for harder ones and a certain amount of poetic licence is used. I decided early on that we would NOT do this. With the equipment available today, there 322 MAKING ‘WOOKEY’ was no excuse not to film everything where we said it was, so that’s what we set out to do. We succeeded apart from three shots. Two are 5 second close-up shots, which were filmed in different parts of the cave from the sequence in which they appear and were not visually location-specific in any way. The third was an explosion sequence. This appears in the film as Sump 1 in Swildon’s Hole, which is a very easy place to get to, but not very diplomatic to blow up. At the time, however, part of our team was exploring and blasting at Sump 12 in the same cave, an altogether much harder place to get to. So we dragged all the filming gear down through Sump 1, our actual location, and on down to Sump 12 where we filmed the explosion. The picture was flipped in the computer and run in slow motion and ‘hey presto!’ we had our Sump 1 explosion. I doubt if there are many film productions that deliberately use much harder locations as a double for easier to reach ones!

Fig. 27.2 Jo Wiseley and Roger Whitehead in Chamber 3, dressed in 1930s gear when playing the parts of ‘Mossy’ Powell and Graham Balcombe. Photo by Gavin Newman Part of the Wookey story involved the first dives done in the caves using Standard Navy Diving Dress. As Sid Perou had done earlier in his series of films illustrating the history of cave diving, we wanted to recreate these dives and film the divers underwater in the very passages they explored. With the help of the Historical Diving Society, Roger and Jo Wisely were able to make a series of dives from the original dive base in Chamber 3, recreating the 1935 dives of Graham Balcombe and ‘Mossy’ Powell. The Historical Diving Society put a lot of effort into ensuring the equipment was as it should be and with Leo filming on the surface and me filming underwater we managed to get a real flavour of what those early dives must have been like. Another reconstruction deals with the first dive in caves using open circuit scuba. One of the Cave Diving Group members, Pete Mulholland, was to play the diver and we had borrowed an ancient and rather questionable twin hose regulator and mask for him to use. Throughout the sequence a suitably hidden stage bottle with trusty Poseidon regulator was there for safety, as was a safety diver, but when the mask started to disintegrate and the regulator flooded some way out from Chamber 9 the look of terror on the ‘lost’ diver’s face didn’t require much acting! Pete kept swimming and I kept filming and the sequence is one of my favourites in the film. 323 WOOKEY HOLE - 75 YEARS OF CAVE DIVING & EXPLORATION

Fig. 27.3 Mike Thomas leaves the water in Chamber 22. Film Still by Gavin Newman

The filming proved to be the easy bit of the project, whereas getting everything and everybody to the locations proved far harder. I wanted to really show the size of the large chambers in the cave but to do this needed some serious lights. I’d managed to get hold of some 270 W arc lights that produce the equivalent of 1200 W of halogen light. They were perfect for the job apart from the 36 V battery power required to run them. Three gel cell type car batteries would give us approximately 30 minutes of light and with two light heads we required two sets of batteries.

Fig. 27.4 Mike Thomas and Steve Marsh, still wearing diving gear, stagger across Chamber 22. Film Still by Gavin Newman 324 MAKING ‘WOOKEY’

The sumps from Chamber 9 to Chamber 24 are constantly changing in depth and buoyancy control of a pack of three car batteries all soldered together became something of an art. In the end most of us adopted the same technique and gave them all to our tame gorilla, Andy Stewart, who abandoned all attempts at buoyancy control and just proceeded to walk along the floor of the sumps with a battery pack in each hand! The lamp units themselves presented the opposite story. At £3,000 each I wasn’t going to risk getting them even slightly wet so I commandeered a large Perspex dry box that had been made by Pete Scoones for the original Wookey film. Due to its size and its tendency to try and kill the diver manhandling it, it became known as the Perspex coffin. The amount of lead needed to sink it made it unmanageable on the surface but the cave dictates at least three carries between sumps to get to Chamber 24… this was nobody’s favourite load! Roger made several dives beyond Chamber 9 where the show cave ends, including one trip to the end of Chamber 24, at the end of which he crawled back to the car on hands and knees and announced he had officially retired! He is the first to admit he’s not a British-style cave diver but he put a supreme effort into the project and got further than I ever expected of him and his reactions were everything I could have hoped for.

Fig. 27.5 Mike Thomas and Steve Marsh approach Sting Corner in Chamber 24. Film Still by Gavin Newman Personally my goal had always been to go as far as I could in Rob’s footsteps and bring back images from as deep as possible. I had never been beyond Chamber 24 before so to hope to get to the end and bring back the images on the first dive was with hindsight rather ambitious. From all the reports I knew the end of the cave was very small so I decided to take a smaller camera and housing than I usually use and built a neutrally buoyant rig including the lights that I could use on the end of a pole to film myself. I reached the end surprisingly easily and started to dig my way down the gravel-filled slot that Rob had followed. At -64 metres I couldn’t get any further; the gravel and the visibility 325 WOOKEY HOLE - 75 YEARS OF CAVE DIVING & EXPLORATION was closing in behind me and the decompression was building up fast so it was time to leave. I’d opted to make the dive on air and in a wetsuit to reduce the number of bottles and extra equipment required, so narcosis was a major factor at the bottom. I pointed the camera in what I thought were all the right places and then headed back. Thirty minutes of chilly decompression beneath Chamber 25 was followed by the short dive back to Chamber 24 and the rest of the waiting team who were fast asleep in ‘bivvie’ bags.

Fig. 27.6 Mike Thomas and Steve Marsh, Chamber 24. Film Still by Gavin Newman Once back on the surface we were able to review the footage and discovered that the water pressure had activated the camera housing’s auto focus button, causing the focus to hunt in and out constantly. All the footage I’d shot above -50 metres was fine but all the footage of the end was unusable. It quickly became obvious that I’d have to go back again. Several weeks later I was back in Chamber 24 with the camera’s auto focus button firmly disconnected. Again the trip to the end went smoothly and all appeared to go to plan until halfway back to Chamber 25 I realised that the wide angle lens from the front of the camera housing was missing…. I spent most of the decompression time more worried about how I was going to tell the team that we might have to do yet another dive than how I was going to tell Leo that his £300 video lens was somewhere at the bottom of Wookey… The video was perfect, so clear and sharply focussed this time that you can see exactly where the lens falls off the camera and ruins everything… Attempt number three was to be the make or break, although I had already broken more than enough. I decided to take the risk of taking my larger and infinitely more expensive camera housing, and hope that digging through gravel with it would not scratch the expensive glass lens. It really 326 MAKING ‘WOOKEY’ was third time lucky. The dive went like clockwork. I reached the end easily and spent five minutes digging around in the terminal slot getting a variety of shots, and headed for home. Familiarity with the location meant that in spite of the narcosis and being blinded by the filming lights shining in my face I was able to get the shots I needed. It was to everybody’s relief when we checked the tape that evening and everything had finally come together. It was not however until much later that we were to find out just how significant that dive was to become. I completed the initial edit of the film and showed it at various caving and diving events where it was received with great enthusiasm. It was at a Dive Show in London that Rick Stanton saw some excerpts from the film and asked if he could have a copy. Rick is generally considered to be the best cave diver of his generation. A pioneer of new rebreather technology, he is also a natural cave diver who really understands caves and how they form. This is something that is so often lacking in the new generation of open water technical divers moving into cave diving these days. Proving this, Rick has on numerous occasions over the last few years found the way forward in cave systems that other divers have declared finished. However, based on the reports from Rob Parker and several other divers who had been there on mixed gases since Rob, even Rick had considered Wookey a finished cave until he watched the film footage from the very end. The film clearly shows a gravel mound in the centre of the passage suggesting a split in the water flow. Rob’s old line leads into the gravel slot on the left but there was a possible space on the right. Rick decided to take a look using a new very low profile side-mounted rebreather rig that he had built especially for such caves and swam straight through the gravel constriction that had always been considered Fig. 27.7 as the end of the cave. Nobody was more surprised than Rick, who had Traversing over the River Axe in Chamber 24. not even taken a line reel. Now beyond the squeeze and back in wide- Photo by Martyn Farr open passage the story was set to continue. My film was proving to be out of date even before it was finished so the only thing to do was continue filming and update the original edit. But the cave proved to go deeper on every dive; this was now firmly side-mounted rebreather territory only. I could film as far as Chamber 25 although beyond was to prove more difficult. But the film had been born of the idea to film Wookey to the bitter end and we weren’t going to be stopped now. I designed and built a miniature helmet-mounted camera unit connected to a waist-mounted digital recording unit that Rick wore on his final dive into the cave. It doesn’t get much more extreme than digging through boulders at -70 m and reaching an eventual depth of 90 m in a second boulder choke. I got a better ending to my film than I could ever have hoped for and in my own little way helped to find the way on in Wookey after 18 years. The film is now finished and I start the hardest job of all in trying to get it broadcast. An early edit of the film won the best adventure film prize at the Kendal International Mountain Film Festival and was only pipped to the grand prize by ‘Touching the Void’, which I couldn’t really complain about! I took on the roles of director, producer, scriptwriter, cameraman,

327 WOOKEY HOLE - 75 YEARS OF CAVE DIVING & EXPLORATION

lighting and editor out of necessity and without excuse made the film I wanted to make. It has been a long and sometimes painful process and I personally made over 50 trips into the cave, but I could never have made the film without the totally unselfish support of a lot of people who helped out and the best gratification of all is that now it’s finished, they still think it was all worth it...

Fig. 27.8 Chamber 25: The Lake of Gloom - the furthest upstream airspace yet reached in Wookey Hole. Film Still by Gavin Newman

Fig. 27.9 The 1985 limit of exploration showing Rob Parker’s line (left) disappearing into the gravel floor at -60 m with a whaleback of gravel in the centre and the suggestion of a passage to the right which turned out to be the way on. Film Still by Gavin Newman

Film Still by Gavin Newman

Fig. 27.10 The completed DVD (available from www.wookeyfilm.com) 328