Northland sea caves waiting to be explored

Matai Bay, or Maitai Bay depending on whose spelling you believe, is one such place at the eastern end of the Karikari peninsular, a comfortable 4 ½ hour drive from Auckland. Since it’s listed in Lonely Planet’s Diving & Snorkeling New Zealand you might expect the area to be over-developed and crowded with divers.

It isn’t. Divers seem to have overlooked the area in favour of well-known sites you pass by on the drive up.

Also, with such a high profile listing you might expect the area to be fully explored by now; thankfully, as I discovered on my very first trip, there is still a lot of opportunity to make new finds.

All I expected from my first trip was some relaxed scenic diving with the pinnacle in the middle of the bay as the highlight. With good weather conditions we took the opportunity to dive the pinnacle first and weren’t disappointed. The tip just breaks the surface then drops to over 50m, surrounded by fish and covered in sponges and other colourful life. It rightly deserved its place in Lonely Planet.

But our second dive of the day really grabbed my attention. With the rest of the group exploring a nearby reef, my buddy James and I went for a quick look into ‘Cray Cave’ described to us as a small cavern full of juvenile crayfish. What we discovered was a 150m long cave with a narrow exit into the next bay.

Given the swell we were unable to exit though we could see the way out. I was full of questions: “How had everybody else missed this?” More importantly: “How many other unexplored caves and caverns were in the area?” Unfortunately, we hadn’t expected to find caves on this first trip and weren’t prepared for major penetrations into unexplored areas, so for the moment we were left wondering.

Later that year four of us made the time to return for a proper look, with plans to investigate every crack, crevice and cave we could find.

This time we were all properly equipped for penetration diving with double tanks, canister lights and guidelines. If more caves were to be found we were definitely going to find them.

The first day we explored Cray Cave again, checking behind every boulder and recess to see if we had missed any passages and again trying to complete the traverse. Once again, we made it to the narrow exit point but still the swell held us back, with the funnel-like nature of the exit changing a 30 cm ocean swell into a 2m washing machine spin cycle threatening to destroy anything or anyone crazy enough to go too far. One day when it is flat calm at high tide we’ll try again.

The second day we headed southwards along the coast stopping at every crack we could find. We had set up a small 7L tank so we could jump quickly into the water whenever we saw a potential lead. James, our ‘canary’, did a great job checking possible spots.

After a frustrating couple of hours finding only very small caves we found a whopper. Without bothering to send in the canary, we got straight into our full penetration gear and headed into the darkness. We came to a huge chamber 100m later, at least 40m in diameter rising 15 to 20m above the water. Soon we found two passages leading higher into the cliffs. The first we followed for 30m before the shallowness and swell stopped us; the second we followed for 50m before we had to stop again. From what our lights revealed, both tunnels definitely continued further, but that would have to wait for another day too.

On our last day we headed northwards to the other side of the peninsular. A local had given us some vague directions to another cave, fully underwater, so we were hoping to strike lucky again. But despite our best efforts we couldn’t find the exact spot, so headed back to take some photographs of what we had previously discovered.

What’s next? We still have plans to complete the traverse and definitely want to get to the end of the two tunnels in the new cave now named Canary Cave in honour of James’ tireless work.

We also hope to find the other underwater cave, with the aid of some better directions, plus we still have a section of the southern coastline to explore. Eventually we’d also like to properly map these sites so everyone can enjoy them, but please remember if you want to enjoy the overhead environment you need to be properly trained.

I’d like to say a big thank you to Andre from A to Z Diving, both for looking after us and being so relaxed about taking his boat into all the tiny little coves and cracks we wanted to investigate.

Finally, in researching this article I was disturbed to find, despite all the great diving, it appears Lonely Planet have dropped their Diving and Snorkelling guide to New Zealand with it no longer listed on their website as an available publication.

Post script

A lot has happened since I wrote this article at the end of 2009. In 2010 the team returned for several more expedition trips, finding more leads and completing our explorations into the already known caves. In 2011, as the only cave diving instructor based in NZ, I started running regular trips to the caves with students, to teach cavern and introductory cave diving classes.

I would love to have continued teaching, exploring and mapping, but alas, Andre decided to close down his dive lodge in Whatuwhiwhi, which made the logistics too hard, and so we switched to exploring the Poor Knights instead. But there is a bright side – the cave mapping still needs to be completed and there are still unexplored leads – which is great news for all the adventurous divers out there.

Jamie Obern is a director of Tech Dive New Zealand, a Tutukaka-based scuba training provider. He is a GUE Instructor Trainer and teaches a variety of GUE diving courses, from beginner through to instructor.