Geonewts, Particle Accelerators and Boat Squats

August 16, 2009 · Posted in Geocaching · Comment

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.

(The full Flickr photoset)

Tags: Geocaching

Rainbows, Kittens, Spiders and Bovines

August 6, 2009 · Posted in Cabin & countryside, Geocaching · Comment

Last weekend was the first in a long long time I got to spend at the cabin almost by myself. The Friday was full of irritating hassle, which included getting our old big ass table from the house Susi, Jori, Riikka and I had been living earlier. The table was over two meters long and made of proper wood, so it was both heavy and unwieldy. I ended up calling a cab for it, which I had the pleasure of waiting for outside in a steadily worsening thunderstorm. As soon as I got it loaded up and heading for the downtown, I was off for the countryside myself.

The trip itself was very much suitable to end a week of grumpiness. The thunder was rolling, the lightning flashed, the heavy rain hit the windshield like a torrent of gravel and the soundtrack was Viikate played loud enough.

At the cabin site I holed up in the smaller cabin and got out my novel project, which has been on a writers’ blockish hiatus for a year or so. Surrounded by the gray light of a late evening, the patter of rain and a blessful absence of all distractions I got the text flowing again.

The next couple of days I spent rowing on the lake, photographing the nature, searching for geocaches, eating and saunaing. Susi arrived at the cabin site on Saturday, probably lured by the four month old kitten that Susi’s mother had got. I like other peoples’ kids and cats, and the kitten made me go into a kitty psychosis, which manifests as babbling inanely and being unable not to pet & play with the kitty even though you are bloody allergic to it.

(The Full Flickr Photoset)

Someone else's kids and cats rock, and someone else's four month old kittens rock even more!

I started the Saturday by retrieving a geocache I had placed on a rock wall in one of the islands in the lake. The cache had been found floating on the shoreline a couple of islands away by some girl scouts. Luckily their scout leader happened to be an avid geocacher, who had logged my cache in the wintertime and remembered it. It’s improbable that the cache had fallen out by itself, so either it was crows or magpies, or some moron with an IQ of a bird. I guess we’ll see how long the cache stays up this time.

In the evening there was a massive rain storm with the most impressive rainbow I’ve ever seen. The wind blew the storm over the lake, with the sun still painting the treeline on the opposing shore and islands golden yellow. You could see the rain front advancing and churning the lake into dark greenish gray. The incoming wind carried raindrops with it and almost pushed me down from my unsteady perch on the shoreline rocks. Then, a massively bright double rainbow going from one end of the cabin bay to another.

There was a sudden rain storm that blew over the lake. You could see the lake surface turning dark grayish green as the wall of rain came in. The wind pushed the rain ahead of it and churned the tops of the waves white. Then, a massively bright double rainbow.

I spent a big part of the Sunday looking for a couple of geocaches. The day was mostly sunny and swelteringly hot and humid. There was a constant rumble of thunder and dark clouds here and there in the horizon. I love that kind of weather when I’m out in the countryside. The combination of sunshine and distant thunder makes the world glow, it stops the clocks and makes everything around you hyper focused, alive, active and beautiful.

The first cache was next to a radio beacon used by aircrafts, but the second one got quite interesting. It was in a small grove in middle of a large field where cows were grazing. The grove was reserved for flying squirrels, but apparently the bovines used it as a shade from the sun. I trekked over other peoples’ orchards and fields, copses and barbed wire fences, until I reached the GPS zero point – which was full of young bulls.

When I found the GPS location for the cache, I had company. Company, who was very curious about what I was doing and lacked all sense of personal space.

Well, I think they were young bulls, but I didn’t lift any tails to check it out conclusively. The thing is that the bovines were friendly, curious and had no sense of personal place. I wasn’t sure how safe crouching around teenage oxen would be, plus there were only so many friendly cow noses and tongues you could deal with, so I decided to come back later and try again.

Umm, that's close enough with the nose, thank you.

Personal bubble, personal bubble!

On my way back I alleviated my disappontment by gorging on wild raspberries, that are ridiculously abundant this year.

I had to give up with trying to find the cache, since there's only so much bovine attention you can take. I comforted myself with raspberries, which were - to put it mildly - abundant this year.

In spite of certain unfortunate hassles I had to deal with, and which trashed certain other plans for Saturday, this weekend was just what the doctor ordered. Peace, quiet and nature. And, also, too much food and A KITTY!

Susi with the kitty scarf.

Tags: Geocaching

Wreck Diving in Åland

July 21, 2009 · Posted in Diving · 7 Comments

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.