I’m a big fan of being near the ocean, but not of being in it.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
Sure, I’ve snorkelled in Fiji, scuba-dived in the Whitsundays and sea-walked in Borneo.
I feel that if I’m in those places and have an opportunity, I’ve gotta take it and try those things at least once.
You know, bucket list kind of stuff.
I can’t say I didn’t have an uneasy degree of anxiety during each experience, yet I don’t regret doing any of them.
Largely because my fears of choking, running out of oxygen, drowning or being mauled by a shark, impaled by a stingray or stung by a deadly octopus weren’t realised, of course.
I lived to tell the tale.
On our recent trip west, to Mount Gambier, a unique little place tucked just over the Victorian border in South Australia, another watery experience presented itself and landed on the bucket list: snorkelling in an inland sinkhole.
Kilsby Sinkhole is just out of Mount Gambier at Moorak, towards Port Macdonnell on the coast.
Its website sums it up as “a unique piece of geology and history in the middle of a sheep farm”.
With no riptides or dangerous marine animals inside, it was a far more appealing underwater adventure for me.
The biggest of our worries was that the weather would be cold on the day of our booking and we’d freeze our tooshies off.
That, and the slight chance the earth above us could cave further in on top of us.
Our guide told us that the briefing building and car park were built on top of the cave and our cars might not be there when we emerged.
She was joking, of course, but that is a future possibility.
“Not our time,” I deduced, as though I’d actually have any clue about when was our time.
But, if you only do things once, the likelihood of becoming a statistic of that pastime is probably fairly low.
And if I’m that unlucky, then I accept it was my time.
Anyhoo, this sinkhole is privately owned.
It’s been in the same family — the Kilsby family — for five generations.
It’s been the site of recreational diving since the 1960s.
In the ’70s, it was used by the Department of Defence for classified testing of a submarine detection system.
And from the early ’80s, the South Australian Police water operations unit has used it for diver training.
The water is so clear, visibility is clocked at 50 metres.
It has depths of 27 metres.
My dad, my middle child and I took the literal plunge on the warmest day of our stay there in January (low 30s).
Given the sinkhole’s water temperature is stable at 14°C year-round, it made little difference once we were submerged; however, it was nice to not be shivering upon rising.
It was a peaceful little spot to snorkel, made so by the pleasant small size they limit groups to.
We had almost an hour in the water to swim, float, duck dive, tread and bob in and around the cave’s covered and uncovered areas.
While there aren’t any large creatures naturally inhabiting the sinkhole, there were three kinds of plankton we could identify after being told what to look for.
There are also two Murray River long-necked turtles that live in the sinkhole, named Turty and Shelldon.
Turty is 21 years old.
She was put there by her owners seven years ago, and joined by three-year-old Shelldon a few years later.
Turty spent our whole visit sunbathing on the limestone outside of the water at eye level, and Shelldon added another interesting dimension to our visit as we all tried to find the little guy while we snorkelled around, which proved unsuccessful in the end.
Towards the end of our time, our guide invited us to remove our flippers to get a feel for being in the water without them.
It absolutely changed our buoyancy in the water, and made it harder to get our bodies vertical.
Aside from the snorkelling experience offered on site, free divers can book to dive at other times, and holidaymakers can stay at the site in one of the villas there.
You can also do gin tasting of the signature small batch Sinkhole Gin, which is made with water from the aquifer that feeds the sinkhole and botanicals from the region.
Or, if you want to just see and learn about the sinkhole’s history, there are other tours offered that don’t involve squeezing into a damp wetsuit and masking up.
You might even see the family of kestrels high on the cave’s walls among the hundreds of beehives while you’re there.
“A unique piece of geology and history in the middle of a sheep farm” certainly is an apt description.