Caving in Wales: Ogof Ffynnon Ddu – The Cave of the Black Spring

July 8, 2010 · Posted in Caving · 3 Comments

The two weeks after our Australian trip it was mostly hot as hell in Finland, and I was busy with getting everything back on track. I generally like hot weather as long as I can escape it, but unfortunately our crappy apartment is freezing in the winter and hot and stuffy as hell in the summer, so I’m not looking forward to summer days in the city. I didn’t have that much time to wind down, apart from the midsummer festival Juhannus which we spent in our cabin with pals, mostly eating, saunaing, drinking, playing board games and sleeping far too late.

NIBBLED BY A CAVING BUG

After that there was too days of catching up with work and equipment shopping, until it was the time for Susi and I to leave our first caving trip ever. Miri has been hinting that I should try it for some time now, and caving has started to sound more and more interesting. As it happened, Miri’s and our schedules didn’t match, but when Dare asked us to come to Wales to check some caves, against all odds there was an empty weekend I could free from the calendar.

(Check out the big photoset of the trip on Flickr!)

The South Wales Caving Club headquarters, where we stayed for the weekend.

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Cave Diving – Kaatiala Quarry

April 25, 2010 · Posted in Diving · 6 Comments

Susi and I had barely got our diving gear dry from our trip to Zenobia before it was the time to leave for another dive, this time to check out Kaatiala Quarry and try out some cave diving. The quarry was operational in 1942-1968 and it produced quartz and feldspar, but after it was closed down people still collected stones that were used for jewelry. The quarry is about 200 meters wide and 30 meters deep, and it has a small cave system that reaches some 85 meters into the stone horizontally, about 40 meters deep.

(See the full photoset in Flickr)

Susi peeking into the smallest entrance to the cave system.

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Holiday in Zenobia

April 23, 2010 · Posted in Adventure!, Diving · 7 Comments

This April Susi, I and a bunch of our pals left for an eagerly awaited and well deserved diving holiday in Cyprus. Our destination was the city of Larnaca, or more exactly the wreck of a 172 meter long ro-ro ferry Zenobia, which is one of the world’s top ten wreck diving locations. Mv Zenobia was built in 1979 in Sweden and it sank on its’ maiden voyage in 1980 after the shipboard computers malfunctioned and filled the ballast tanks with water. The ship sank at a place where the sea bottom is 42 meters deep. It’s lying on the seabed on its side, with the starboard side reaching up to 16-18 meters. The visibility is about 20-50 meters and there is very little current, so it’s like made for both beginning and more experienced divers.

(Check out the full photo set in Flickr!)