E078 Bruce Clulow - Caves of the South Pacific

This episode is brought to you by our brilliant sponsor XDEEP and by the patrons of Speaking Sidemount, huge thanks to both for their support. Speaking Sidemount has featured many of the top cave diving regions of the world… I'm thinking Mexico, Florida, UK, the Bahamas, and Sardinia. But it's been awesome to also dig deeper into regions not well known for caves… places like Sweden, Indonesia, Australia, and Canada. Now along these lines… I've known for a while that many of the Pacific Islands have cave systems and also of course I get asked a lot about the caves of New Zealand. So when I saw a post from Bruce Clulow, a  well-known and very active cave explorer here in New Zealand talking about his exploration in the Cook Islands, I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn more and share with you all about the caves in what is loosely my back yard. Bruce is a commercial airline pilot flying for my favourite airline… Air New Zealand. As you'll learn, this is just a  cover for a hugely passionate and capable cave explorer… who is part of the Group known as the Kaarst Monkeys… yep we'll get into that too… In this episode, Bruce talks about how he got into diving and cave exploration. He shares some really valuable insights into Human factors for diving leaning on his experience and application of this discipline from his aviation career. We talk about his cave exploration in the Cooks before he shares a fantastic story of bumping into Robert Thomas my guest in Episode # while on a tourist excursion to Wookey Hole in the UK. I ask Bruce to share about the Caves of New Zealand and what it takes to dive the caves here. We talk about cave rescue and recovery before he shares on his upcoming exploration projects. All this and much more in this episode of… Speaking Sidemount.