Christmas Under the Red Sea
So, my half a year stint in the National Library of Finland drew to close in the end of the year. I would have had the chance to continue there, but the information about it reached me rather late and I already had something else cooking. Continuing in the academia would have been fun, the work environment was comfortable and I learned a lot of new things from the assignments. The problem was that facing a half a year contract and very scattered assignments it was a bit hard to truly commit to the work.
Nevertheless, the turn of the decade is really something else and I really can’t complain that life would be boring right now. First of all, instead of the customary Christmas foods and family visits we did something quite different, which was to fly into Egypt / Hurghada on 24th of December to spend the holidays diving. This coincided with Älymystö’s new release being out right in time for the Christmas Eve.
Secondly, in the beginning of January I will start in my new job, as the publicist and making of -producer of the movie Iron Sky. So, in the last couple of years I’ve wandered from press and on-line media to TV business, done a stint in academia and now into the fabulous movie biz. I do suspect however that the Iron Sky gig will not be that much about snorting coke from the thighs of prostitutes than watching Timo and Samuli work in their underwear. Nevertheless, I’m really enthusiastic about the assignment – I’ve been very interested to be a part of the Iron Sky production, but it just hasn’t been a practical option for the last couple of years. Now I get to jump in right at the most interesting time, the start of the actual production.
Thirdly, after only a couple of days of work I’ll get to take my first holiday, since Älymystö is going on tour after far far too long a pause. We will be stopping in Tampere, Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga, where we’ll play the new songs from the fresh album. If you happen to be in town, come and see us!
But let’s start from the beginning, our week in the Red Sea.
THE CHRISTMAS EVE
Our Christmas ever started at six in the morning, when we dragged ourselves up from our warm beds and headed off to the airport. Outside the weather was uncharacteristically wintery for Helsinki, a regular winter wonderland. The flight and the arrival to Hurghada and our hotel Magawish went without any problems, a relief with all the airport strikes and whatnot that have been plaguing travelers lately. There was a bit of a hassle with our diving gear, which we had planned on taking to the dive center in the evening so that they would be ready right in the morning. We didn’t take in account that the dive center was completely closed the whole evening and we didn’t really know at what time we should be at there in the morning. A little bit of digging around got us the facts and all was good.
(See the full Flickr photoset)
It was a nice surprise that the price of the trip inluded a Christmas party at the hotel. It was held in the main conference area, whose walls were lined with a massive Christmas buffet. We got a table with a Finnish mother and her daughter and a Swedish family, who were a nice bunch to chat with. The food was great and this must have been the first Christmas dinner where I recognized only half of the foodstuffs. There was also Christmas programme which was entertaining enough. There was a long dance and a music show, which… well, it wasn’t the brightest star of musical theatre ever created, but the performers seemed to have fun on the stage and their spirit was very infectious.
We ended up turning in rather early, anticipating the following day’s dives, with bellies full and minds setting into a holiday mood.
THE FIRST DAY’S DIVES
The first day’s dives are always a bit of a hassle for us, especially if we’ve had a bit of a pause. We took a daily boat to South Point and Aquarium East, where we got reacquainted what it was like to dive when a bad visibility is 30 meters instead of the three meters we’ve used to, and everything under the water is extremely pretty, but potentially deadly.
I had impulsively bought a new mask in the morning, one with a wide field of vision and clear sides, which I tried out in the first dive. It was an extremely good purchase, a bit like changing your old 30 inch TV to a brand new 42 inch LCD widescreen model. Susi had a bit of trouble with her dry suit, specifically the sleeve valve that is used in venting air out from the dry suit. It tended to not function unless you pressed it, which had a potential to cause problems later when it got actually clogged with salt.
The dives themselves were pretty much ok. We got a bit of drift diving, saw a positively ginormous napoleon fish, some brain corals and moray eels. Nothing mind blowing, but definitely a nice start for the holiday and a good day of diving to get ready for the safari.
When I got up, I noticed that the leg of my dry suit was still leaking a bit. I had been suffering from the damn leak for over a year, the seams of the suit had been gone over several times but nothing had seemed to help. With the help of Gunnar, our diving pal and guide we originally met in February in Egypt, we turned the suit inside out, filled it with water and started going over it. In the end Susi spotted a really small pearl of water growing on the opposite side of the pant leg from the seam. There was a pinprick sized hole there, virtually impossible to see with naked eye, but enough to start leaking in high pressure when the suit was creased just so. Some emergency patching ensued in the hotel room and lo and behold, it seemed to solve the leaking problem – fucking finally! Now I’ll just have to find out the asshole who has punched a hole into my suit.
Finding the leak on the dry suit.
HOW TO FIND THISTLEGORM WITH IPHONE AND LIVE TUNA
On the next morning we got up at around five and dragged our asses to the pier where our liveaboard dive boat was ready to leave for the three day safari. Three days living in the boat, doing 3-4 dives per day and spending the time in between eating, napping, chatting and reading books. Can’t get much more relaxing than that. Our guide for the safari was Amir, a local guy who’d been our guide in the first dives we did in our February trip.
The first dive of the morning was in Siyul Kebir, which was a pretty enough reef dive. After that we were supposed to go to Thistlegorm, which made Susi and I go all boing boing. Thistlegorm is the most famous wreck in the Red Sea, made so by the old Cousteau documentaries. According to some estimates it brings more money to Egypt than the Pyramids. Last time around the window weather had kept us from going there, but now the winds were uncharacteristically calm for the season.
To our surprise the location of Thistlegorm was completely empty of other boats, which was a lucky thing – usually there could be as many as 15 boats in there, each carrying about ten divers or so. The deal was that we were supposed to kit up and wait for Amir to go out and take down a rope to the wreck. We ended up sitting half a hour or so in our gear and watching the zodiac zoom over the waves and the bubble trail of Amir go here and there. Finally he got up, doing the “cancel the dive” signal. Apparently there was no GPS in the boat and the wreck just could not be found. It looks like the wreck is usually found using the hive mind of other boats – just go where the biggest throng is.
A tank on the bottom of the sea.
One member of our group was an Austrian physics student called Angel – a friendly geeky guy Susi and I had been chatting with. When I realised that I have an iPhone with a GPS, he had already jumped up holding up his. What ensued was a furious conversion of co-ordinates from one system to another, after which Amir was back in the water, Angel was zooming around in the zodiac trying to get a fix on the location and the safari boat following the two. We got closer to the wreck, but there was nothing to be found in the exact coordinates either. This is when Amir showed his mad skillzs in scuba guide business. He spotted a stream of tuna swimming purposefully towards a certain direction and started following them – there’s very little marine life around Thistlegorm, but the wreck is teeming with fish who use it as a shelter.
And this is a story how Thistlegorm was found using an iPhone and some live tuna.
DIVING IN THISTLEGORM & EQUIPMENT TROUBLE
We couldn’t believe our luck and neither apparently did our guide Amir. We ended up having Thistlegorm all to ourselves for four whole dives, three in the first day and one in the following morning. According to Amir this had happened to him only once. I got to say that the solitude at the wreck made the diving experience even more atmospheric and great than it would have been otherwise. Whenever I dive at wrecks where members of the crew have died, I consider a certain melancholy reverence to be in order. Having the place swarm with divers doesn’t really help in that.
So, a Thistlegorm was a cargo ship fitted for wartime use with some deck guns. It was transporting a cargo of trucks loaded with motorcycles, steam locomotives, tanks and other wartime gear when it got hit by german bombers. A direct hit to a cargo hold made trains and other equipment fly away from the ship, which then sunk down. Nowadays a big part of the cargo is still intact and you can even find a steam locomotive standing right side up in the bottom of the sea.
The steam locomotive cabin is gone, but the boiler, wheels and other details remain.
On our first dive we did an overview of the wreck and some light swimthroughs of structures. When we got up, Susi declared that her dry suit could disintegrate, she could get the tourist flu and the Red Sea could boil over with storms and the trip would still have been worth the money at that point. Universe of course heard this boast and what do you know, when suiting up for the next trip Susi’s dry suit’s neck seal tore completely through. Torn neck seal carries a high probability of the whole suit flooding, which is a baaaad thing especially when you are in a wreck. Here a special thanks is in order for our guide Amir, the crew of the ship Francesca and our group member Anu: in a matter of 10 minutes they scrounged together a wet suit, boots that fit Susi’s monstrously large feet and a spare hood, after which we were on our way and the rest of the safari was saved for Susi.
INSIDE THE WRECK
On the second dive we got to go in to the cargo holds. There’s always something really cool about swimming to a part of the wreck that looks like it’s impenetrable debris, slipping into a shadow under a hanging sheet of iron and ending up in a low passageway that leads deeper into the structure of the ship.
The hype about the wreck isn’t exaggerated – it was rather easy but very interesting to dive, the trucks, tanks, motorcycles and deck guns provided more than enough to see, not to mention all the marine life that took shelter in the wreck. It was clear that the heavy diving was taking its toll on the wreck. The air bubbles get trapped in the holds, rusting and corroding the metal, and accidental bumps as well as intentional vandalism is breaking up the wreck. I’m happy to have had the chance to dive inside Thistlegorm before it will be forbidden, which seems inevitable at some point.
The third dive was a night dive. Amir had been up and down in the sea for god knows how long when he was looking for the wreck and after that with us, so he decided to skip this dive to get some security margin. This was more than reasonable since he had already gone through a half an hour decompression to keep his dive computer happy (and, presumably, to keep nitrogen bubbles out of his brain and capillaries). It turned out that Susi and I got to take the point in the next dive, which made the night dive triply as cool for us.
After the dive, when others had already gone up, we spent some time hanging on the rope at five meters, watching the schools of fish the boat lights attract around the dive deck. The sight is incredibly beautiful, but unfortunately very hard to photograph. There was a school of mackerel-like sleek fish with yellow tails, a school of palm sided fish that glittered in several metallic colours and in between them few bigger fish the other fish tried to avoid. Above there was the ship lights glimmering on the churning surface, below there was a deep indigo depth.
In the morning we bid farewell to the wreck by checking out the locomotive outside and doing another penetration. This time the water inside was clear as air, all the silt and rust flakes having settled during the night.
WRECKS, REEFS AND CHRISTMAS TREES
After Thistlegorm we went to dive in the skeletal remains of the wooden sail/steam ship Ulysses and had a couple of nice dives around the Gubal Island and the wreck of a barge that had been sent to help the sinking ship. Ulysses was a beautiful wreck with the sunlight shining through the beams that used to hold up the deck, and all the glassfish glittering inside, but the barge was more of a biodive than a wreck dive – there was a lot of marine life taking shelter in, around and under its scattered remains.
I hadn’t realized that according to Amir about 90% of the safari boat crews can dive and they apparently sometimes jump into the water when we are away. Now they did a really nice surprise for us – when we circled back to the barge after doing a sweep of the corals, we found a small inflatable Christmas tree fastened to the bow of the wreck. This was a really nice feelgood thing from them and a fun surprise.
All in all the atmosphere on our safari boat was nice. Our group included a friendly Finnish couple with whom we talked about diving in Finland and some previous trips, a friendly and perky Finnish woman called Anu, the Austrian guy Angel, with whom we talked about astronomy, physics and all kinds of geekery, and then again a Danish guy who turned out to be a bit of a sourpuss. In the beginning he was nice enough, maybe a bit standoffish but nice to talk with nevertheless. As the safari progressed, he turned more and more sour, apparently because he wasn’t that interested in wrecks, which are mostly what the north Red Sea safaris are about. I tried to engage him in conversation for some time, but in the end decided that if he has decided to not have fun, it’s his business.
MORE WRECKS, LUSH ISLANDS AND ORGANIC MACHINERY
Our trip continued to Ghiannis D, which was a bit problematic for us in the last time. In our previous dive in February Susi’s bottle slipped almost off and my mask was leaking wildly, which made the dive a challenge on our 30 dive experience. This time around the dive was far easier and very enjoyable. Ghiannis D is a large cargo ship, heavily listed on one side, and it has a lot of indoor spaces to dive in. It’s a nice challenge to get into the wreck in its low part, then rise up through corridors full of pipes, walkways and pillars. Looking up when diving is difficult and you have to watch your buoyancy when ascending. If you don’t let out air from your suit or vest, you start going up faster and faster, which is generally a bad thing when diving indoors. This was also the first site of the safari where we faced other divers.
Going almost straight up.
Anthea-fish playing in the bridge of the ship.
We also dived around Shabruhr Umm Gammar and Umm Gammar, visiting a beautiful coral cave in a depth of about 20-30 meters, and going to see a shipwreck that consisted mostly of the ships engines and drive shafts lying on a steep incline. I love wall dives and inclines that vanish somewhere below in the blue, maybe down to R’lyeh for all I know. The ship engine was slowly being overtaken by corals, making it a friendlier version of Giger’s biomechanic horrors. I loved it the last time I saw it and now even more, since I could concentrate more on the scenery and less in the diving.
In one afternoon we took a small walking trip in a nearby island. You can’t really describe it as lush or verdant, but in its desert like desolation it was very beautiful – especially with the rusty debris, sun bleached seashells and remains of the corals all around. It felt good to get to stretch my legs after spending time in the boat.
DAILY DIVES AND A MENACE TO CORALS
After the safari we had two days for daily diving, which meant hitting the boat in the morning, doing a couple of dives and returning to shore in the evening. After the lazy pace of the previous days and the good chemistry of the safari boat the first daily dive felt a bit hectic. Both of the dives were drift dives, which technically meant that we could mostly just jump in the water and let the wonders of the marine life slide past us. The first dive of the day was my hundredth dive, which I started by promptly flooding my camera. I noticed in 10 meters that the camera case was taking in water, managed to signal our guide Christina about the problem and then get up to give the camera to the boat crew. Not surprisingly the thing didn’t work even after I did my best to dry its insides afterwards.
The dive was in between two locations, Erg Somaya and Gorgonia Garden. We saw a tortoise feeding on the corals, large gorgonias and other beautiful coral structures, which provided plenty of targets for rubbernecking. On the second dive we ran into a strong current that forced us to turn back from our intended route. We did an U-turn, going over a small ridge in between two coral pinnacles. There we had to swim against a current strong enough that it made my dry suit pant legs flap. I settled into a nice rhythm and managed to keep my breathing steady, but for a moment I thought Susi wouldn’t make it across. In the end of the dive we got within a touching distance of a tortoise, which was really neat! The fact that there was a bunch of people clicking their cameras around it didn’t seem to bother the animal much, although it paid a few suspicious glances on the crowds.
One thing about the dive made me a bit angry. In most divesites you can see broken corals and in certain places large areas of them are completely dead and crushed, and now I saw one reason for that. There was a diver in our group who had a camera, a lot of enthusiasm and zero body awareness – or zero interest to pay attention to his surroundings. He kept pointing stuff like single fish to me and others, darted here and there, bumped into me five times in one dive, and kept kicking fist sized clumps off of corals. In the end of the dive I felt like grabbing his tank valve and punching him in the back of the head. I mean, everybody brushes against the corals now and then, but its far cry from going through them like your flippers were the blades of a lawn mower.
"You in there! Yes, motherfucker, you, I'm talking to you! Stop kicking the corals! Don't make me come over there!"
BIOTECH, THEOLOGY AND A NIGHT DIVE AT HARBOUR
On the boat we had one of these chance encounters with really interesting people and had a very nice chat. One of the divers was this older guy who turned out to run a biotech company that’s creating a new kind of treatment that’s supposed to bite on all kinds of flu viruses. We had a nice chat about immunology, after which it turned out that the guy is doing some astro-archaeologic studies as a hobby, researching pyramids all over the world, measuring them and finding deeper meanings in their measurements, their relationships to neurology and plasma physics and so on. From there the discussion took a tangent to the neuropsychology of religious experiences, trancendence, relativism, Discordianism and theology. Now I kind of regret that I didn’t get the guy’s name or contact info, because the discussion was far less new agey than it sounds. Oh, he was also out to do some kite surfing and off road biking. Definitely an interesting case, that one.
Susi and I had signed in for a night dive, but unfortunately nobody else had, so we didn’t get a boat. Gunnar did a personal favour for us and took us out to the Colona “home reef”. In practice we kitted up and walked to the sea in front of the dive center. This doesn’t sound that special, but we were in for a surprise. We did a round around the shore and under the pier where the diving boats are moored. There was a pick up truck, a lot of trash, distressing wads of toilet paper – and a shitload of marine life. We saw two squids, a scuttlefish, a ton of cornetfish, several lionfish, a weird thing that looked like a translucent intestine, those weird sea star like things that look like half plants, small scuttling crabs and small white baby morays. And listing these I’m sure I’m forgetting something.
After the dives we got decent and went for some thai food with Gunnar and Christina – a very enjoyable night with some interesting chat about how goddamn cool it is to work as a dive guide and why we should consider doing it ourselves.
THE LAST DIVES, FEATURING SOLO WRECK PENETRATION
Our last dive day Gunnar was our guide and not surprisingly the day consisted of wrecks. I also got a camera, since the friendly couple that was on safari with us had the same exact model I had and they were kind enough to loan theirs to me for the day.
We headed off to El Miniya, a Russian built mine sweeper that was sunk on the harbour during one of the Egypt-Israel wars. Since they have had a seven day war, three days war, half a hour war and a nice afternoon war with snacks, I have really no idea with one it was. The mine sweeper is close to the wreck of a fishing ship, so it’s a nice two-for-one location for wreck divers. This time we went down at El Miniya and made our way to the Fishing Boat. The last time we were there I was far less experienced, the dive was a bit scary because of the long swim (or what then felt like a long swim!) underwater and I surfaced with 15 bars in the tank (an equivalent of getting home with two liters of gas in your car gas tank). This time it was nice and leisurely. The wood eating worms had been busy in the fishing boat and it was fast coming apart. We had good time peeking into hatches and doing a slow circuit of the wreck.
There were some tech divers with us on the boat and we heard them talking about a moray eel one of them had banged with his tank on El Miniya. In our second dive around the wreck we bumped into the animal. There’s a hole in the side of the wreck, which I wouldn’t have dreamed of exploring the last time, but now decided to check out. When we got there I saw the moray eel, which indeed looked rather peeved. I gave it wide berth and descended into the tear in the hull. I peered in to some of the corridors, which were rather narrow and had cabling and such all around them. We weren’t equipped to go in and it was definitely out of my skill level to go any further. Later I heard that me and Gunnar were the only ones who actually noticed the moray eel. Susi tried to feed it her ankle and an Italian diver we had with us almost gave the animal some finger food.
Our last location was the remains of a diving safari boat Balena that had caught on fire and sunken on shallow waters. We had to fly on the following day, so it was the perfect site for our last dive. Flying after diving is a bad idea, as most of House MD fans maybe know. The wreck was a pleasant dive, there was a lot of debris on the bottom to examine – including dive equipment like dive bottles and pieces of inflator hose, which was a bit disquieting.
We did some rounds in the upper decks, and our plan was to go inside to the first indoor deck to do a round inside. There we had a bit of a communication breakdown. Gunnar went down the hatch, but I Susi, a girl called Paulina and this Italian guy we were diving with lagged a bit behind. I waited for them, Gunnar came to see what’s the hold up and I followed him down a hatch. Gunnar went into a corridor, I realised that nobody was following me and returned to the hole to see where everybody else was. Susi signed me that everything is ok, I mistook this as a sign that she’ll be following and started down the corridor, where Gunnar had gone to – although I didn’t see him anymore.
Soon I realised I’m in the other end of the wreck, inside it and I don’t see anybody else, and considered it to be one of those situations where turning back is the best option. Later it turned out that Gunnar had seen me the whole time from where he was, there was plenty of light coming in through the windows and a couple of boltholes back to open water, so there was no real danger there. Also, apparently the Italian guy wasn’t much for keeping contact with his dive buddy, doing his own thing around the wreck instead, and the girls had decided not to split the group further by following us.
All in all it was a really fun day of diving, well worth being the final one for this really excellent trip!
THE NIGHT OUT & BACK HOME TO PARTY
Gunnar and Christina had invited us for a night out in Hurghada, not in a party mode but just to go chill out. We kicked off the evening by sitting in a local coffee shop, smoking hookah and sipping coffee – all in all a great way to wind down. After that we went to their place to chat for a moment, followed by an excellent dinner and some ice cream out in the town.
Afterwards, when Susi and I were sitting in a local taxi, blasting through Hurgada downtown towards our hotel, I felt profoundly content. The smells of incense, dung and sea were wafting in through the cab windows, my stomach was full and my mind was at rest after a week of wonderful vistas of nature, great people and relaxing exercise. Certainly one of the best holidays I’ve ever had and as a bonus, all kinds of great stuff to wait for me back at home.
On the next day we made it through the chaos of Hurghada’s abysmally inadequate airport and inefficient air control and got on our way back home. According to the pilot we were an hour behind the schedule, thanks to the tardiness of the air controls and a 200 km/h headwind we were experiencing. When we were over Helsinki, it was half past nine in the evening. The earliest fireworks were already going off and it was great to see them from the height of 800 meters.
Kalle and Hanna were hosting a new year’s party which we had planned on attending. For a while we thought that we might be too tired to go there, but in the taxi I started thinking about finishing the holidays with a boring evening at home. I suggested to Susi that we should just plonk down all the luggage, not touch any of them or turn on the computers, just do a quick change of shirts and emergency showers and take off – which is what we did. Hacking off the 20 cm of really hard snow from the top of the car took some time, but we ended up in Kalle’s place just in time to get a short stint in sauna and go see the fireworks. The rest of the night went to chatting with pals, eating more good food, visiting Jori’s sisters who were living in our previous commune house and generally having fun with people.
All in all, the holidays were so great that I’m getting suspicious again. Perhaps this is balancing out the sucky 90’s, or then I’m looking at a bill of a face cancer and a career as an accountant. Be it as it may, fun was had. Life is good. Peace out.
(See the full Flickr photoset)
Wreck Diving in Narvik
In the middle of the October Susi and I finally went on an eagerly awaited diving trip to northern Norway, in the city of Narvik. It’s one of the best wreck diving locations in the world, since during the World War II it was a strategically very important location, being the only efficient port for shipping out iron ore from the Swedish mines in Kiruna. Consequently there were several battles over the city and its harbour, which littered the closeby waters with the wrecks of cargo and war ships.
19 HOURS TO NARVIK
The trip itself was pretty merciless: 19 hours straight in a minibus. Our plan was to leave at nine in the evening on Wednesday and return in the morning hours of the following Monday. I took the whole Wednesday off and had a well meaning plan to have a good night’s sleep before the trip. I didn’t count in the fact that I’ve been slightly off my game lately, getting kind of stir crazy and frustrated over certain things. Consequently I stayed up ’till far too late (or early), so most of the day went in an insomniac haze and in the evening I was dog tired.
(Check out the full Flickr photoset)
In our group there were fourteen people travelling in a minibus, a van that also carried most of our gear, and one Land Rover. Susi and I were stationed on the minibus, where we holed into the back seats and tried to get some sleep.
Nine tenths of the trip went by in a haze for me. The seats were hard, narrow and not adjustable, so I spent most of the night in a semi delirious dream state, trying to get myself comfortable and being neither properly asleep or awake. When I finally came to enough to understand something about my surroundings, we had crossed over to Sweden and were just passing over the Arctic Circle. The world played to that beautifully: there was snow outside, reindeer were blocking the traffic on the roads and there was a wintery morning fog that gleamed incredibly brightly in the morning sun.
After that I was slightly more awake after that and stayed up to admire the scenery. When we reached Kiruna and the surrounding mountainy areas, I wished we could have had a couple of stops just to take photos and explore the industrial buildings and equipment around us. The area between Kiruna and Narvik kind of define the word “desolate” at this time of the year. There were mountains that were covered with sharply defined lines of white snow and dark brown, almost black ground. There were no leaves in the trees, the ground was brown or dirty yellowish gray; occasionally there were massive rusting industrial buildings and beaten up trains loaded with gas containers or large, open and thoroughly rust covered ore carriages. I could spend days just photographing all that stuff.
THE ARRIVAL & THE BOAT
We arrived in Narvik in the evening and had to wait for a moment for our ship, M/S Galten, to arrive. It turned out to be a really comfortable and nice diving boat: there were several private cabins, a sauna, a nice – although a bit cramped – kitchen and or course a large indoor diving deck with racks for the suits, a lot of benches for the divers, heating, music and so on. The only little complaint was that there was no toilet in the lower deck, so if you had to take a leak in the morning hours, you had to clamber all the way up to the open deck to the only toilet in the ship – but otherwise, a brilliant boat!
As so often in these restless insomniac bouts, I got more alert in the evening. People settled down in a common space in the lower deck of the boat to chat and destroy some beer, wine and Bowmore that was left over from our Åland trip. Fun was had, and I even had the common sense to hit the bunk in a reasonable hour.
THE FIRST DAY’S DIVES
In the first day our dive locations was M/S Stråssa, a 121 meter long freight ship that got hit with a torpedo in 1940. There were several surprises waiting for us, the first one being the proximity of the wreck: like several others, it was within a viewing distance from the dock where the ship is moored at nights. The second one is that this wreck, and most of the others were in rather shallow waters, well within OWD certification. The third one was the amount of marine life visible.
Diving in the Baltic sea you get used to seeing a sea bottom that’s like partially terraformed Mars. You get some algae and vegetation in shallow waters, but anywhere below 10 meters it starts turning into clam covered gravel. I hadn’t put much thought into the matter, so that’s what I was expecting from the North Atlantic also.
When we followed the buoy rope down I didn’t at first realise that we were coming down to a wreck – I thought it was fastened on the sea bottom. This was because the area where we touched down was covered with large leafed vegetation and there were arm long pollocks swimming around the divers. Compared to the Baltic Sea the water was really clear, the visibility being 10-15 meters. It took me a moment to realise that we had touched down on the aft deck of a wide ship – and then I was facing a new surprise in the form of sea anemones, coral like structures, hermit crabs and all kinds of marine life.
The wreck itself was an interesting dive also. The first dive was a bit cumbersome, since there was just enough current to make things feel a bit difficult. Initially it made both Susi and I wonder if our diving skills had really gone completely rusty, since maintaining proper buoyancy felt hard and swimming was cumbersome. When I realised that it was the current, not just me fucking up, things started going better. Susi was a bit underweighed, which made it doubly difficult for her.
After we had fixed up the situation, the second dive was a real blast. There was a heavy surface current, which felt like jumping into the ship’s steering engine stream, so we had to pull ourselves to the buoy by a rope. According to the ship captain the current was really nothing, so I’m really wondering what kind of a torrent they usually have. In the bottom the torrent was completely gone and we had a really good time. There was some light wreck petting in the form of diving through the covered walkways on the sides of the ship. There were also more opportunities to inspect the marine life. Susi spotted a palm sized crab, but me and the third guy in our group didn’t notice her frantic signals, being engrossed in our own investigations.
Oh, there would have been a second wreck 20 meters away from this one, but since we had only single tanks with us, we decided to skip it. Especially so when on the second dive we had the third guy with us. He was diving with air, not Nitrox, plus we didn’t really know how experienced he was. But no matter, there was more than enough to see in Stråssa. Also, getting back to the boat was fun. When we got up, the only thing we had to do was to let the surface current take us to the boat – and try and remember to grab the ropes hanging from the ship as we went past them.
This evening we left the chatting and drinking a bit short, and not only because four Englishment who were on the boat with us came to ask us to shut the fuck up and not keep them awake ’till silly hours like yesterday. I actually got in several hours of quality sleep.
THREE DESTROYERS IN ONE DIVE
On the next day we went to a site with three destroyers side by side. Really. Ok, they hadn’t all sunk like that, since at least one of them was towed there, but still – in most diving locations there’s one wreck here and another there, but Narvik harbour had two mostly intact destroyers lying within viewing distance of each other. The main attraction was the destroyer Wilhelm Heidkamp, which was standing upright in the bottom. You could see the fastening points to the torpedo launchers, the barrels of some 5cm guns the ship had and you could also take a peek through a hole in the side and see the washrooms of the ship.
We thought we’d take a look at the other destroyer in our second dive, but unfortunately we didn’t get the chance, since we switched locations – but not for the worse. The target was a freight ship called Neuenfels, which is over 140 meters long. It was torpedoed in the harbour and according to the briefing you could go into the sea bottom, find the torpedo hole, enter the wreck and go straight up and through one of the massive open cargo holds. Susi and I had again the third guy with us, since his dive buddy had another unfortunate problem with his equipment. We decided to go and see the torpedo hole and enter the wreck for a swim through if it looked safe.
It was already dark when we got down and the water was a bit murkier than we got used to. We went to see the rudder, with bolts half the size of a human head, and went around the corner to check out the torpedo hole. The water in front of it was silted, so apparently plenty of other divers had had the same idea. Darkness, silted water, a gaping hole with sharp looking edges and inpenetrable darkness behind that… Yeah, we decided to skip it this time around.
What can I say about the wreck apart that it was massive, well worth seeing.
My mask had been a little bit inconvenient throughout the dive, pressing my eyes in a weird way that made it hard to focus. In the end I tried to fix it, but managed to get it to leak in a way that refused to stop. There was just ten minutes of dive time left, so instead of asking Susi to check it out or trying to do any big fixes myself, I just let it be and beared with the occasional slosh of seawater against my eyeballs.
On the next day our plan was to wake up at seven in the morning, jump into the car, visit our last dive location of the trip and then head off for home. I skipped all the offers for an evening beer or wine and headed off for bed.
Trying to sleep that night made me sympathize a bit with the Brits, although their cabins were on the far side of the corridor, as far away from the common room as possible. Ours was right next to it and apparently the wall had the sound proofing qualities of a soggy tissue. I never got awake enough to ask people to tone it down a bit, which is a shame, since in the end I got something like three hours of solid sleep.
DIVING IN AN AIRPLANE
In the next morning I tried to wake up a bit cranky after the badly slept night, but the trip had been so much fun that I really couldn’t do it, so I just had a morning coffee and bounced around like a moron going “tralala”. We got our stuff in the cars pretty quickly, but of course getting 14 heavily equipped people to get their shit together took some sitting around.
Our last diving location wasn’t in the sea, it was actually in the mountains. Moreover, it was an airplane. Some 40km out of Narvik there’s a mountain lake called Hartvigvattnet, which the Nazis used for an airstrip. One of the Junkers 52 planes fell through the ice in 1940 and makes for a very interesting dive location. A bonus dose of interesting was provided by the fact that apparently there’s a really cranky landowner involved, who’s really jealous about the road that goes to the lake. The story tells it that you can placate him with beer, so we grabbed a six pack from a gas stop and headed out.
We got quite close to the lake when it got apparent that our van and minibus couldn’t handle the road ahead. Calling it a road is a bit generous, since most of the way it was just two tire tracks in a field, but the last stretch it was basically a road shaped strip of mud. We were debating about aborting the dive, when someone pointed out that there was a nice, brisk river going down to the lake and our Land Rover would have no problem with the mud. So, let’s everybody get kitted, jump into the river and the Land Rover can pick us up in the other end and bring us back.
It was really fucking fun. The river wasn’t deep, a bit over a meter in most places, but the current was brisk, the water crystal clear and the bottom was like in an aquarium. Susi and I didn’t see any underwater life, but a few others spotted salmon or trout hiding next to the shore while they zoomed past. The river carried us right into the lake nestled in between mountains and almost right on top of the sunken plane.
The plane itself, well – I’ll let the photos and the video do the talking. What’s not shown there is a pilot’s boot, apparently authentic, one of us found in the wreck.
HEADING BACK HOME
The only thing left was the gruelling 19 hour drive back home. We were supposed to switch drivers every couple of hundred of kilometres, but two people from our group kept hogging the steering wheel, for which I think everybody was grateful. I didn’t have work on Monday, which I also had taken as a day off, so I volunteered to take the graveyard shift behind the wheel. Early in the trip it had turned out that the minibus was a… well, a bit of a piece of shit. The back lights and the brake lights had been flashing on the way to Narvik and the car kept blowing out the fuses. There was also a drive assist system, which had mainly hampered driving until it had burned out.
On the way back the back light fuse actually melted and the guys had to McGuyver around a bit to get us halfway legal to be on the roads. In practice they tore out the innards of the back lights from casings and replaced them with a dive light and a cheapo Clas Ohlson flashlight.
(Check out the full Flickr photoset)
My driving shift becan at four in the morning. Since the shitty seats sabotaged all the plans for sleeping, I was already in a state of sleep deprivation where I wasn’t actually tired, I just felt 12-pack drunk. Unfortunately the first thing I faced was the road from Jyväskylä to Heinola, which is a narrow and winding and has a lot of truck traffic. Additional fun was provided by the steering, which had something like 30 degrees of slack before it started actually turning the wheels, the tendency of the car to drift sideways and a rain that was alternatively snow, sleet and water. As I kept joking, mortal terror keeps one awake pretty well. When we got to the motorway, things got far easier. Right before Helsinki I handed over the controls to one of us who actually knew where we were heading and who didn’t keep seeing cars and moose that on the second glance weren’t really there…
A GREAT, GREAT HOLIDAY
If you are interested in wreck diving and you have a chance to go to Norway, go and visit Narvik. DiveNarvik is a great operator, M/S Galten is a comfortable ship and the selection of wrecks they have is bloody amazing. The great thing is that you don’t have to be a tech diver to get to see all the cool stuff, since for example all the wrecks we went to were in OWD depths. Officially they do require AOWD and 40 logged dives, but I think you can talk yourself in with just OWD too. As far as I saw it, if you know how to dive from boats and you don’t panic if you hit a bit of a current, you’ll do fine.
On a personal level this was a really goddamn great autumn holiday. A nice yank out of the grind, a lots to do, good food to eat, sights to see, great people to chat with and yeah – if a holiday takes me two work days to recuperate from, I know I did something right.
Adventures in Diving: Waves, Currents and Live Munitions
Last Saturday Susi and I went for the first diving trip after far too long a pause. The last time I was underwater was the Park Victory trip a month ago, but for Susi the pause was a little big longer. We’ve closing on to our trip to Narvik to check out some WWII hardware, including at least one Junkers airplane. Diving fever has been high for us and we’ll need to regain our sea… fins, so off we went to check out the well known locations around the Helsinki area. Turns out, we got a pretty interesting diving trip.
I checked out the weather forecast in the previous night, which promised a 8 m/s wind in the Helsinki area. I was half expecting for the boat trip to be cancelled, although I hadn’t any idea what kind of waves there would be in the sea. No such call came, so in the morning we dragged ourselves to the pier where the dive boat usually leaves.
The ordinary skipper of the boat was in some kind of a training, so we got an another guy at the helm. We were also in for a pleasant surprise – there were only four divers this time instead of the ten or so we usually have, us two and another couple. This promised some luxury, since there would be no need to try and handle the gear with someone’s elbow in your mouth – the whole dive deck would be ours. The reason for this was that a private group had cancelled their Park Victory trip, so the boat was basically idle for the day – no sense in not taking it out to the sea if someone was willing to go.
Wind and Waves
When we got out to the sea proper, the wind and the waves picked up. I think the waves were peaking at about two meters, which doesn’t sound like that much, but we started really feeling it. When we hit a big wave head on, it splashed right over the cabin and down to the dive deck. All of us were inside the cabin, hanging on to the handles on the ceiling. Our equipment was of course out in the open diving deck. We had to stop the boat for a moment and move them closer to the shelter provided by the cabin, since our diving boxes were starting to gather some water and we’d kinda want to use our dry suits dry.
The first location we reached was Coolaroo wreck. The boat kept swaying hard enough that walking without holding on to something felt a bit risky. 1,5-2 meter waves don’t sound that much, and you can handle them on board pretty well. Now then, imagine that you are lying on the floor with a 40kg backpack, and that you’ll have to climb on to a table. Then imagine the table, the floor and everything going up and down 1,5-2 meters and you can maybe see the problem.
There was a silent moment after the skipper asked if we’ll like to go to the water. Considering the pause in diving I said that I don’t feel absolutely comfortable hopping in there, but I’ll do it if everybody else is going. I guess that was a signal for everybody else to agree that let’s go to an another location, which would be a biosite next to a rocky skerry.
On our way there we passed another wreck and decided to stop there the check if the weather would be better. Surprisingly enough the waves actually were a bit softer in there. The waves were still high, but not scarily so. It took some time to maneuver the boat so that I could snatch the buoy from the waves and we could get the boat moored and start getting out our equipment.
…and just when we had done it, the skipper realized that the waves were still strong enough that the boat had ripped the buoy loose.
Mooring Trouble and Underwater Currents
Finally we got to the skerry we were aiming at and on its lee side the wind and waves were considerably more subdued than on the open sea. Nevertheless it took a lot of trouble to get the boat positioned correctly. It had to be moored on the shore, which required someone to hop off from the boat and fasten a rope on a ring attached to the rocks, and we also needed to set down the anchor, so the boat would be moored on boths sides and wouldn’t keep hitting against the rocks. The guy why jumped ashore slipped on the slimy rocks, but managed to only skin a knee. The worse thing was that he’d forgotten his undersuit, so the clothes he was wearing were supposed to keep him warm while diving – and they got somewhat wet.
Finally, after a lot of maneuvering, we got the boat settled down and finally managed to hit the water. The location is a place where we’ve gone diving a few times, a nice place for beginners and ok for those who want to go a bit deeper too. There’s also a lot of weird stuff to find, like shotgun shells and even intact cartridges, clay targets, boat batteries and so forth. Also, solefish, mudcrawlers and other random biostuff.
After we’d been diving for a moment, I realised that I was really feeling the waves rock us in a depth of 11 meters. Moreover, the rocking wasn’t steady. We’d go some distance in one direction and then just nudge a little bit back. I tried to keep tabs on where we were, right up to the point when we hit an area which makes the compass go a bit wonky. But well, it’s a familiar site, so we’d be able to go straight back to the boat, wouldn’t we?
Munitions and Ear Trouble
We were closing on to 45 minutes, which was our agreed on limit, when I spotted something curious on the sea floor. It looked like a half a meter long thermos bottle, mostly covered with small barnacles, but some detail was visible. Like the grooving on the top end and a certain cartridge like shape on the bottom. Now, I haven’t been hanging around heavy artillery, so I don’t really know how the artillery rounds look like, but I’d imagine it can’t be far from that. Also I remember someone else saying that they’d found something “a bit heftier than shotgun shells” around there, and there is a navy firing zone in the same map page…
We didn’t have a buoy with us and we were running out of gas, so it didn’t leave us any time to pinpoint the round’s location or mark it in any way – it was the time to head back. This is when Susi signalled that her ear was fucked up. I took to trying to navigate back to the boat, so I checked a direction and headed that way, although I had a distinct vibe that something is now wrong. The route I chose would have taken us deeper, but Susi’s ear trouble prevented that, and we didn’t want to swim in the mid water with no visibility to the sea bottom. We decided to surface – which, as it’ll turn out in a moment – was a good decision to make.
When we were doing our three minute safety stop in the depth of five meters, I got nauseous. The waves kept jostling us to-and-fro, we couldn’t see the sea bottom and obviously everything around us kept moving to the pace of the waves, so the only thing in me aware that we were moving was my inner ear. Luckily, before it got unbearable, we surfaced.
…200 meters away from the shore.
The Swim Back & Diving in Circles
So, it turned out the waves had created a current which had pushed us about 200 meters away from the skerry and on to the open sea. Because we were far further away from the shore than I had thought, the direction I had chosen underwater would have missed the skerry and lead us to the shores of Latvia.
Moreover, while we had been under, the waves and the wind had picked up. It took us a moment to see where the skerry and the ship was, and… weird, why is the boat sideways to us?
We didn’t think of the ship that much, but concentrated on swimming to the shore through the waves. It was hard going and the shore didn’t seem to get any closer, although for some reason the ship was. Susi suggested that we should swim underwater in about three meters, where the waves wouldn’d fuck with us that much. We went under, Susi fixed up a compass direction… and started swimming in a circle with a diameter of 6-7 meters or so. This made me a tad bit worried. Susi is kind of good with underwater navigation, and I kind of suck in it, and even I wouldn’t do that kind of a mistake. After a couple of loops we decided to resurface. Turned out her ear trouble threw her sense of direction and balance completely off and all the jostling in three meters didn’t really help it.
We continued swimming, vaguely aware of a smaller boat zapping around us somewhere. We had to stop quite often to regain our bearings, since the visibility amongst the waves was poor and they kept tossing us off the course. When we got within a shouting distance of the dive boat, the skipper shouted that the anchor got loose and he had to detach the ship from the shore. The ship was adrift, because you really couldn’t use the engine that much with divers in the water. Dicing your customers with a propeller is frowned upon in the diving circles. There was a rope in the water we could have used if we had missed the boat, but luckily we were able to intercept it with very little trouble.
When we had clambered on board and got our breath back, we realised that the skerry didn’t really seem to be that much closer than when we started swimming towards it.
The Endgame
The other couple got on board soon after us, having gotten caught in the same current as us. On our way back the waves shook loose one of the bottles, but luckily we managed to catch it and to stop the boat before it took an unannounced solo dive.
It turned out that the guy with the zodiac boat was a tech diver, who had been checking out some dive sites, but because of the weather he hadn’t gone under. He had arrived to meet with our skipper just as the anchor had slipped, which was a stroke of luck. I can only imagine how the skipper would have felt being on a boat that’s hammering itself against the shore, with four divers in the water and no help.
That said, althgouh the trip was a bit interesting in the Chinese sense of the word, it was fun and rewarding. There is a definite joy for me in getting to use my skills and managing to do well even in challenging circumstances. The situation was risky, but everybody acted sensibly and carefully and at least we had a refresher in the lesson of respecting the nature. Oh, a quick disclaimer, just to make sure: I’m in no way criticising the skipper or the dive center here, I don’t see any reason to do that. Quite the contrary, a difficult situation was handled as well as one could have in the circumstances.
So, this diving trip was a nice way to end a one month plus hiatus. It was rewarding once again to see that even though the situation can go a bit antsy, neither of us seem to be prone to panicing. Of course the situation here wasn’t that dangerous, but it felt good flirting with danger a bit.
Also, as I said, it’s good to get a small reminder now and then from the nature concerning who’s the boss in the end.
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