Geotrip Featuring an Abandoned Kindergarten
Last weekend I went for a short geotrip, but ended up finding a few cool places – like a windmill near the area I used to live for years and an abandoned kindergarten. That’s the cool thing about hobbies like geocaching. You end up going to all kinds of weird places you’d otherwise never see.
I couldn’t get in to the kindergarten, but the yard itself was pretty atmospheric. You can find the photos in my Flickr.
Utö / Park Victory – Wrecks, Fortifications and Toads
Last weekend I and a number of people from our diving club went for a two day trip to Utö to check out the Park Victory shipwreck. Utö is the southernmost inhabited island in Finland, it has some military presence and a population of 50 or so. The island has been inhabited from the 16th century and in addition to a lighthouse, a radar station and a military watchtower there are some old fortifications in the southern tip of the place.
The main event of the trip was to go diving on Park Victory, a massive steam ship that sank in 1947. It’s the largest wreck in the Finnish national waters and a popular, although challenging dive location weatherwise. Additional challenge is provided by the fact that the ship is in military waters, so you need a permission for every person who dives there.
The history of the Park Victory’s sinking is quite a melancholy one. On the Christmas Eve of 1947 the 9000 ton ship was approaching Finland in a severe snowstorm. The ship’s crew had skipped the Christmas party, because the captain Zepp had arranged a money collection amongst the crew, and the money was to be used to buy socks filled with candy for twenty Finnish children (this was after the war and times were very lean). The children and their parents were expected to board the ship when it docked and join the crew for a Christmas dinner.
The winds were high, so the ship docked to wait for the weather to calm down. The anchors didn’t hold, and quarter to one in the night the ship drifted to underwater rocks. The crew managed to free it using the ship’s engines, but it drifted back on the rocks at 2:15 and got caught on the midship. The structure didn’t hold, so the ship broke in half and sank in twenty minutes. The rescue ships got on location in the morning, when out of the 48 crew members 10 had died.
For more information in Finnish, check out Hylyt.net.
As it happened, on Saturday the wind was too high to even think of diving. The waves were over two meters high and the wind was calming down, but not fast enough. I hadn’t been feeling that well during the morning and the day, so I went to sleep off the achy feelings. After we met at the boat in the late afternoon to decide that an evening dive was out of the question too, I went to explore the island.
All in all Utö is ridiculously idyllic. There are small red and white houses, boathouses all along the waterline, an old lighthouse and so on. In addition to that you have a couple of military structures, which break up the idyll a bit.
I had a fun afternoon jumping from boulder to boulder and photographing stuff. Of course my camera battery started running out right when I found the abandoned fortifications on the southern end of the island, and I didn’t have my flashlight with me. After a dinner and a sauna I simply had to go back properly equipped.
Yes. A stormy dark night on an island with an history of shipwrecks and drowned people, me alone exploring abandoned fortifications with the sea pounding the rocky shore nearby. No, I have never seen a horror movie, why?
On the next morning we got up before six and by the time the sun was rising, we were already on top of Park Victory wreck. The waves were still quite high and the only sensible way to get to the buyoy and the rope leading down to the wreck was to pull ourselves there with an another rope – swimming was too difficult. I almost fucked up and forgot to set my dive computer for nitrox (again). Luckily I caught the error when me and my two dive buddies were only five meters deep, so I could come back up to fix the situation. Unfortunately trying to set the computer with the waves rolling over me and my brain still foggy from too little sleep was too difficult, so I had to drag myself to the stern of the ship and back again, before diving down. How’s that for a morning exercise.
We did three dives around the wreck that day and it was worth every dime. The visibility was 10-15 meters, which was excellent because the sheer size of the ship is one of the attractions of the place. Lying on the sea floor, looking up at the bow of the ship you could only imagine the racket it made when it slid down the rock wall. You can still see the gouges it made.
All in all, an excellent weekend. There was good food, sea air, sauna, geocaching, light urban exploration and obviously diving. Right now that makes up at least 3/4 of my favourite activities in one weekend, so not bad at all!
Geonewts, Particle Accelerators and Boat Squats
Last week I spent two more or less beautiful summer evenings looking for geocaches and just enjoying cycling around the Helsinki area. It was nice to notice the five hours straight cycling on both streets and off road, climbing trees and clambering up cliffsides didn’t make me terribly tired in the end. Apparently the plan of “exercise by accident by diving and caching” is starting to work.
I took a bunch of photos, which can be found in my Flickr gallery, but here’s a couple of examples.
On the first day I went looking for a geocache next to a particle accelerator lab in a thunderstorm. Yeah, no superpowers and not even a small tear in the fabric of time and space – what a disappointment. My plan of getting superpowers by hanging around particle accelerator seems not to work. This is the second time I tried something like this. The first time was me getting a splinter of wood in my finger in the radioactive material storage room of another particle accelerator.
The photos is taken with iPhone camera, which tries to process the photos somehow on the fly. If you move the camera while taking the pics, funky results ensue. When I SMS’d my pals about what I was doing Ville asked me for photos of the last moments in this reality. This is what he got.
Didn’t find the cache. Found a newt instead.
The next day, which was sunny. The Kulosaari church area is ridiculously beautiful, especially on a clear weather like that.
The weird houseboat I found last year.
A detail on the wharf.
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