Allendale East Cave
Introduction
Known as the hole in the middle of the road or just ‘the Dale’, Allendale East Cave is a very popular site among the CDAA Cave rated divers in the Mount Gambier region. As it presents itself as a non-complex cave to dive in, the Soggy Wombats Team has been training, developing skills and accumulating experience in this cave since 2019. Although geographically far from the most developed cave systems in the region, ‘the Dale’ has a small ‘tunnel’ at it’s deepest end that has been in most of Australian’s Cave Divers dreams to break into something big. There hasn’t been any breakthrough in this cave in the last 20 years or so, but with the advances in exploration techniques, we might be surprised with what the future will tell us.
Line Survey and Photogrammetry
Although the first line survey produced by the Wombats using the MNemo goes back as early as 2020, Allendale was surveyed only in 2022. The photogrammetry model produced by the Wombats in the same year was the first full cave model we produced and helped shape the equipment settings and configurations we used for future photogrammetry projects.
One of the great features of the MNemo it to give you a quick general idea of the direction the cave is heading. Grubby Wombat was the first Wombat to play with the first version of the equipment back in 2019. Most recently the wombats are using the MNemov2 in their projects. Check more information regarding how to learn and use MNemo in your projects in this article in our page.
Overlay of the Wombats’ first line survey in the Allendale East Cave.
Photogrammetry is a powerful tool, however a little complex to dominate in an dark, underground water filled environment. The Wombats used Allendale as the ‘playground’ to firstly understand and later develop different techniques of data gathering and how the available software deals with them.
Out of the first model produced by the Wombats, they have produce their first digital contour line map through CloudCompare. As divers, producing a map that can give you precise information about depth is fundamental for dive planning.
Later, using the Professional version of Agisoft Metashape and multiple trial and error attempts, the Wombats were able to merge surface and underwater scans. The accuracy of the model scale has been confirmed through measurements of objects inside the cave (drum barrel) as well as depth and overlaying geo-referenced maps (via GoogleMaps).
We prepared a ‘swim through’ video of the Allendale Cave (check above). You can have a good idea of what will be your dive before you get there through it.
If you would like to explore the models, we are hosting them in Contrukted Reality and Sketchfab. They offer different features and it felt like we’d like to share both with the wider community. To check the main features of the cave and understand it’s plan view, check the model in Sketchfab. If you would like to navigate by yourself through the cave, check the Construkted Reality model.
Most of the information and documents we produced are available in CaveDB. We have partnered with them as an intent to maintain all produced information free and accessible to anyone in the cave diving community or the broader public.
As an outcome of all the data we collected, an updated map of the Allendale East Cave overlaying the cave and the surface features has been produced. Let us know if you’d like a high resolution of the map.
