Wreck Diving in Åland
In the end of the July Susi, Jukka, I and two other divers from Finland went to Åland for a four day wreck diving trip. This coincided with an American car show, which Gunnar – who had been our guide in our Red Sea trip earlier this year – was attending.
Our dive center was Dive Åland, and although the first communications with the staff over the phone and email left a bit unclear vibe, after the four days I can heartily recommend it for everybody. The center is a ten minutes drive from the ferry terminal and it combines a dive shop and a small hostel. In practice there’s a big room with several bunk beds, a smaller private room, a sauna and a fully equipped kitchen. The pier where the boat left for the closer dives was right next to it. Extremely handy and comfortable. Additionally the staff were nice and helpful guys and the briefings & the logistics were top notch.
(See the full Flickr photoset)
In any case, we had four days of wrecks. Baltic sea is a good wreck diving location, because the low salinity of the water keeps the metal parts from corroding so fast, and the wooden parts can survive for centuries. All in all we visited five wrecks:
- Plus is a large 70m long sail ship built in 1885. It sank during a stormy December night a stone’s throw from the shore. The sailors who happened to swim in the right direction survived, the others drowned.
- Caskelot is a sailing boat that sank on 1970. You can find the nylon sails next to it and read the mileage and other information on the instruments.
- Nederland is a Dutch river barge that sank with a full cargo of street bricks in 1917.
- M/S Gävle is a Swedish marine research vessel that sank on 1975. It’s heavily listed, but in a very good condition. A lot of the rigging is still intact, which made this a very interesting diving experience. The visibility was ridiculously good, something like 15 meters, so navigating through the ropes and cables wasn’t that hard. There was an equipment locker someone had recently broken into, in spite of the key still being in a “break the glass in case of emeregency” box next to it. There was a lone gas mask hanging out the door.
- S/S Belliver was the true money shot of the trip. It’s a large steam ship, which was accidentally found by the same crew that found the Soviet submarine S-2. Since the wreck was found only in last winter, it’s still relatively unmolested by stupid fucks who steal stuff from wrecks. On the deck you could find the compass, the ship’s bell, a course corrector, some plates and of course the ornate captain’s toilet. If you went outside the wreck, you could peek in from the holes in the aft and see the bunk beds of the crew. S/S Belliver is about 300 meters away from the Soviet submarine S-2, which we didn’t get to visit, because of something about it being a wartime grave and containing live ammo. Pffsh.
Here’s somebody’s video from the wreck:
And this is someone else in Plus, with tech diving gear and a professional level video equipment.
Sail ship Plus from Slawek Packo on Vimeo.
Learning to Dive
There aren’t that many photos from under the sea. I seemed to have lost my underwater camera fu, so most of the photos came out pretty crappy. On the other hand the plateau effect of diving I’ve been struggling with this spring let go and I suddenly found out I had far better buoyancy control than earlier, plus I spontaneuosly learned how to do a helicopter turn. I guess I need a bit more XP to learn how to back up.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t mistakes, the most irritating being almost locking up my dive computer. The mysterious zoology of diving: an angry Gekko can mess up 48 hours of diving, so one should treat their Gekko right. I had set up the computer on 32% nitrox mix on the previous night, but this time there happened to be a long enough a pause in between the dives for it to reset itself for air. This meant that when I was in the ass end of S/S Belliver, furthest away from the buoy line and right at the bottom of the sea, I noticed the Gekko giving me six minutes to get back up. We started heading back for the buoy line, I got some extra deco minutes from the computer but a slow ascent kept the computer happy.
The other mistake was missing a MOD warning for the gas I was using, but since I had set the alarm on 1.4, it wasn’t that bad – I got maybe down to 1.5 and so I was still meters away from actual danger. For those whom which the previous was complete Hebrew: with enriched air you can go only so deep, depending on the percentage of oxygen in the air mix, because oxygen turns poisonous in certain dephs. MOD is the maximum depth for a given gas mix and the 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6 are partial pressures of oxygen. The higher it goes, the more certain you are to get oxygen toxicity and to start convulsing. 1.6 is considered the maximum safe limit, but those that play safe (like me) use 1.4.
In any case, the trip was really great, even with all the sunburns from falling asleep on the boat in direct sunshine, and the back muscles that are screaming bloody murder after lifting the tanks and kits for four days straight. If you are interested in wreck diving, Åland is well worth a visit.
(See the full Flickr photoset)
Recommend Me Good Point’n'Click Adventures for DS
During the last couple of years Nintendo DS has become my mobile gaming console of choice and I tend to carry it where-ever I go. Mostly I use it to amuse myself during the lunch breaks, unless I happen to have a handy book. The problem is, having completed Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars yesterday, I’m running out of games to play.
The most important criteria for lunch hour games is that they can’t be real-time or require fast reflexes. If I’m cutting pizza or trying to catch that one elusive olive with my fork, I don’t want to have to think what’s happening on the screen. Apart from that, I’m partial for point and click adventures, either pure ones or something like the Ace Attorney -games, which are pure genius from the point of view of gameplay and storytelling, both of which are very important considerations for me. I have also played and liked Hotel Dusk: Room 215 and Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
So, if you know any DS games, which fit the above mentioned criteria (no real time action, a good story), I’d be grateful for any recommendations!
Deep Diving, Tinkering, Gaming & Moose Shit
As the subject hints, this has been a week of diving, fixing up stuff and gaming. Susi and I decided to do the PADI Deep Diver specialty, which many dive centers require before letting you go to locations in a depth of 30 meters or below. In the beginning of the week we had the theory session and watched the PADI video, chuckling at the clear blue waters and the tropical climes as opposed to the conditions we have here.
Algae & Moose Shit
On Wednesday we drove to Hanko’s Varisniemi with Dare, Mika, Jukka, Tube and Suvi. The latter two were doing their AOWD, Mika was refreshing his feel for the dry suit before Friday’s deep dives and Dare was getting generic experience points for diving. The place wasn’t quite in the aquarium mode it had been on last December. A big part of the sea bottom above 10 meters was covered with stringy algae, which Dare plowed up into swirly storms. I caught myself marveling at the algae, wondering what variety it is and thinking that instead of irritating it was also kind of beautiful.
On the way back home we almost hit a moose, which is not an uncommon way to die on Finnish roads. I was holding the steering wheel with one hand, getting a bottle of water, when I suddenly noticed a stupid young bull moose crossing the road over to our lane. When driving alone, I have tried to mentally practice for the situations and I was glad to see that the reflex took over. So, we almost missed the moose. The only thing that hit the hood and the windshield was a splatter of moose shit.
Almost Archeology
On Thursday I was supposed to go and help a marine archaeologist pal dig up the remains of Isoluoto sea battle, but the lady luck didn’t agree with the plan. I did a lot of extra hours at work in the beginning of the week and got the day free. Susi had to skip the trip because she got a bit coughy after Varisniemi and didn’t want to risk the Friday’s deep dive. It was sunny and sweltering hot, and I got on the road a bit later than I would have wanted. The highway to Turku was closed and I managed to make a couple of wrong turns, which cost me half an hour or so (that damn route has something against me, really).
When I got to the harbour, the gang got ashore from what turned out to be their last sonar sweep for the day. The boat had to leave and what do you know, all the interesting echoes were from places where one couldn’t get without a boat, so no diving for new wrecks then. The secondary plan was to go to an open mine to dive just for fun, but when I got back to the car, the starter engine stayed completely quiet. The starter cables didn’t help, so it looked like the starter engine itself had given up the ghost. We got the engine running by pushing the car, which of course meant that I had to drive it straight back to Helsinki and a car repair shop without a single stop.
Well, that’s one way to spend a day off: four plus hours in a car on a sunny weather, just to go and say hello to people. Well, on my back way home, I heard that the open mine was full of people taking their basic diving course, so there would have been no diving there either. Be it as it may, I was more than a little pissed off when I got home.
Deep Dive Course
The deep diving course includes four dives up to the depth of 40 meters. On Friday we had the first pair, the location being S/S Sundsborg. It’s a wreck of a large merchantman built on 1877 and sunk on 1929. The length of the wreck is 77 meters and it’s about 28-37 meters deep.
30-40 meters doesn’t sound that deep, but comparing it to buildings helps to understand the scale. One floor of a building is maybe 2,5-3 meters high, so imagine lying on the ground with the surface on the level with the roof of a 12-16 storey high building next to you. Also going that deep is pushing the limits of recreational diving, for which people use compressed air or nitrox, which is a gas mixture that has over 21% of air. You can stay that deep only a few minutes, because a) with a single tank you run out of air and b) because your body accumulates so much nitrogen that if you try to get straight up, you risk getting the bends. Then there’s of course the nitrogen narcosis to think about.
Both of the dives were interesting and fun. Instead of the balmy blue waters of a PADI video we went down to complete and utter darkness, with cold water and visibility of a couple of meters that went progressively worse as we kept kicking up silt from the deck of the ship. This was also my test run on the new MetalSub dive light, which was quite a change from our silly little lights. Yep, it cost 750€ as second hand gear, but it was worth every penny.
We managed to explore only a few square meters of the deck before we had to head up. I didn’t notice any signs of nitrogen narcosis, maybe apart from being more relaxed diving in a tight bunch than usual. While diving my personal bubble gets bigger than usual and bumping into people pisses me off, but this time I tolerated it better than usual. On our way up Jukka made us do some multiplication with a 7-8 digit numbers to test for the narcosis. I did the first half and Susi the second, and considering the fact that we were hanging on a damn rope under the sea and I suck at pen and paper multiplication, we got it correct enough.
The second dive was a bit more exciting for me. I got one of those thanks that were a bit underfilled. The 300 bar tank was on 220 bars when I connected it, and when we went under it was around 200. No wonder, I hit the turn back -limit of 150 pretty fast and when we were ascending to the decompression stop, it fell to 70. I got to try breathing from a pony bottle (which – and I can’t stress this enough – is not an euphemism for a furry blowjob) so I could make the ascent without hurrying up too much.
All in all, a very interesting experience. From the little I saw of it, S/S Sunsborg looks like a very interesting dive location. Also down there I felt for the first time that I was in a completely different element, foreign to humans. The feeling was not intimidating, just exciting and intriguing. Can’t wait to get back there.
Gaming and Tinkering
The weekend was spent gaming, eating well and tinkering around the house and various hobby equipment. I tried out MadWorld, which didn’t really impress me, and spent a great deal of time finishing Fallout 3’s Point Lookout. The DLC was pretty decent, but not without its faults. I was nice to get something that wasn’t a direct pipe-run such as Operation Anchorage and most of The Pitt, but somehow the whole didn’t work as well as it could have.
The swampland didn’t look that convincing and the whole southern flavour was squandered on tired old inbreeding and moonshine jokes. The swamp people were nicely challenging as an enemy, but the didn’t feel like they made much sense. In Fallout 3 tough enemies generally also look tough, so it felt stupid to have to shoot a half-naked guy on the face for a five minutes to get him down. Apart from that whining, the openness of the new areas and certain other storyline elements certainly worked.
The more challenging part was opening up my MacBook Pro and cleaning up the fans and the trackpad button, which has got semi stuck. Opening up the laptop, cleaning it and reassembling the thing wasn’t that hard in the end. There was only one leftover screw and the computer rebooted on the third try, after refastening the memory chips. Cleaning the fans was easy and after a bit of paper slip therapy the button now has a crisp click.
All in all, the week and the weekend was very relaxing and fun, apart from the car debacle. Just one hint, though – do not pick up Boom Blox Smash Party in the Sunday night at 11 o’clock. If you are lucky, at two in the morning the fourth “well, I’ll complete just this one with a gold medal” is the final one.
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