While many of the Soggy Wombats have known and dived with each other for years, it was only when an extension to the Englebrecht’s East cave in Mount Gambier was discovered by Josh “Grubby Wombat” Richards and Matt “Sleepy Wombat” Aisbett that we started to recognise that a small, dedicated and discrete team would be needed to coordinate and lead the site’s exploration.

Located in the heart of South Australia’s second largest city, Englebrecht’s East cave has been dived since the 1980s and has primarily been used as a training site for divers taking their first steps from cavern diving into truly overhead cave environments. However with a maximum depth of 5m and having just 20m of horizontal cave before reaching an air chamber and rockpile, and site access requiring divers to carry their gear up and down four flights of stairs just to reach the water, it was understandable that most cave divers wanting to discover new tunnel had completely ignored Englebrecht’s East.

The surprise discovery by Josh and Matt of fresh passage at the back of Englebrecht’s East posed a unique challenge: how do you explore virgin cave running under the streets of a city globally renowned for cave diving, and do it without tipping off the entire diving community in the process? The secrecy wasn’t driven by ego, but concerns for diver safety. This new cave extension required advanced sidemount and sump diving skills to access safely, but Englebrecht’s East was easily accessible to anyone with the equivalent of an Intro to Cave certification.

Forming the Soggy Wombats turned out to be the solution – a small group of divers with unique skills and experience, all working together to support the exploration of sensitive cave sites with an end goal of total transparency and openness once a site’s risks were thoroughly documented.

While Matt spent 2020 and 2021 working over winter in Antarctica, Josh brought in Chloe “Chatty Wombat” Reid and to support the exploration in Englebrecht’s East. With years of experience in emergency departments and intensive care units, along with specialist sump rescue training from Dr Richard Harris (of Thai cave rescue fame), Chloe provided critical medical oversight while actively pushing the ends of the cave. Meanwhile, Martin “Weird Wombat” Slater squeezed and slid through ruthless underwater cracks to check every potential lead with Josh as they surveyed and mapped what soon would come to be known as the “Englebrecht’s East eXtension” or EEX. 

Using the Mnemo underwater survey tool, it quickly became apparent that the EEX was following a common pattern found in other caves around Mount Gambier – the tunnels roughly aligned with fracture lines (caused by ancient volcanic action) that run roughly East-West and NW/SE, and the largest underwater rooms could be found where these fracture lines intersect. Surveying and mapping EEX also started a tradition within the Soggy Wombats of surveying, documenting, and sharing data from the majority of the caves we dive in. To date the team has surveyed over 15 kilometres of cave in both Mount Gambier and the Roe Plains, providing critical data on cave structure and using hydrogeology models to support further exploration.

Besides helping lead the exploration in Englebrecht’s East, Martin also started work on an online platform to share the photos, videos and survey data the Soggy Wombats collected. CaveDB.net provides a web and mobile app to check out potential dives sites, upload photos, document vertical access requirements along with countless other options, and offers a central repository for the Soggy Wombats and other interested cave divers to contribute to a global cave database focused on exploration. At the time of writing, Cavedb.net has roughly 1,900 cave sites recorded across six continents… and we’ve barely started adding all the cave sites in the US and Mexico!

While drawing a map can help divers plan, nothing quite compares to seeing a photo or video of a newly discovered cave. When it came to announcing the discovery of the Englebrecht’s East Extension, there was no question that Simon “Sunshine Wombat” Backman would be the one to get it all on film. Having spent years filming his fellow skydivers, Simon had turned his talents to cave diving and had become well known for planning and executing underwater film shoots that perfectly capture the nature of the cave and the personality of the divers in the shot. 

Well-shot video helps a viewer get a strong sense of the cave, and accurate maps can give divers a sense of scale underwater, but it took the extraordinary photography skills of Will “Churrasco Wombat” Passos to help bridge the gap by developing realistic 3D models of the caves using photogrammetry. With advice and support from the team at the Maria Concordia Project, Will mounted multiple Gopros and video lights on a “Christmas Tree” that would allow even the most technically inept wombat to scan the walls of a cave and produce a photo-realistic 3D model. This approach to photogrammetry has already been proven to be more accurate than some of our survey data, particularly around chimneys and floor holes where compass headings are hard to establish, or in sites that are too sensitive or silty to safely attach a MNemo to the line.

While the Soggy Wombats may not have the same resources or experience as the “Wet Mules”, there’s no question that this small team of soggy, nocturnal, digging marsupials is bringing a fresh approach to cave exploration in Australia. By calling on each of our individual strengths, and making the collection and sharing of accurate data our first priority, the Soggy Wombats have already made discoveries that have changed the landscape of Australian cave exploration. 

As we collect more survey, video, and photogrammetry data, and check every lead we can get our wombat noses into; there’s no doubt the team will make more discoveries that help expand the understanding of the underwater world beneath our feet. So if you go down to the forests of Mount Gambier and spot a very soggy wombat crawling out of an awfully muddy hole, just keep walking – you’ll hear if they found a cave as soon as they can tell you!