After catching an overnight ferry from Oslo (Norway) to Copenhagen (Denmark), Jamie, Eline and I boarded a flight that I had been anticipating for a long time. We were finally going to Iceland! This country is spectacular for its diving, landscapes and social atmosphere, it is place far away from Australia and a place I didn’t now how good the diving could be.

On arrival we were met by Tobias Klose, the owner of Dive.is He had generously offered to take the three of us scholars for a week diving tour of Iceland. He sorted us out with the best accommodation of our year in the heart of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik. The first morning in Iceland we were picked up and taken to the Thingvellir National Park (a UNESCO world heritage site) and given a talk about the cultural and historical significance as well as natural and geological uniqueness of this area. This area is located smack-bang on the Mid Atlantic Ridge; it’s the area where the North American and Eurasian continental plates meet and drift apart about 2 cm per year. The water here is cold (2-3°C) due to the fact that it is melt water from a glacier about 50 km away and has travelled through the lava fields for 50-100 years before coming out through underground wells. But this makes the water the clearest in the world, with visibility exceeding 100m!

The two dives we did there were some of the best of my life, I didn’t even have to see a fish! (Well, I did see one). The water was cool 2°C but I didn’t get too cold for the two 30 min dives, thanks to TUSA for their HRS drysuit and Fourth Element for their Xerotherm Arctic Undergarments. The water clarity was a joke, it was like swimming in air! I also found it amusing to take my reg out and drink the glacial water (until my face went numb!). We had a great couple dives there, luckily the land temperature was a fine and sunny, so we could sit around in the sun and warm up and talk about such cool (mind the pun…) dive!

We spent the next day visiting Tómas Knútsson, the founding owner of Dive.is, he has currently moved away from the diving business and is focussing on his passion for the environment. He has founded the Blue Army and SEEDS (See Beyond Boarders – www.seedsiceland.org) in Iceland where volunteers come and learn about environmental and cultural issues and the positive steps they can take to make the world a better place. It all started with underwater cleanups, removing tonnes of rubbish from the harbours, but Tómas and his team have recently been developing an old military base into a centre for environmental education and research with a particular focus on moving away from our dependence on non-renewable resources.

After we had been given some valuable insights from Tómas, again reconfirming my beliefs on the need to all do our part to care for the environment. We were given an afternoon on a whale watching boat, this was particularly interesting as Iceland still legally hunts the minke whales. But whaling is becoming less of an industry due to low prices for whale meat and the government realising that whale watching ecotourism is bringing a much greater revenue to the economy. The whale watching was good fun as the weather was rough and the three of us were the only ones that stayed in the top deck braving the wind and waves. We saw about 5 different Minke whales, pods of dolphins and loads of seabirds diving for fish. But I got to see one thing that I had never seen before; Puffins!

The next day we picked up by our new friend, Louis Kotze, originally from Namibia, he was our Divemaster for the trip and drove us around to all the cool spots. We did the Golden Circle tour and saw some of the natural tourist attractions such as volcanos, waterfalls and geothermal Geysirs before diving a place called Bjarnagjá. This is an old larva ravine, but is special because it is 25 m deep, with the top half freshwater and the bottom saltwater. This provides a unique environment where the freshwater fish live above the marine fish!

Our next mission was to the north of the country to dive the geothermal chimney Strýtan. We drove the 400 km north from Reykjavik and stayed at a beautiful farm house overlooking the Eyjafjord. We woke to a perfect day of cloudless skies and no wind and boarded an old fishing boat and travelled to the site with Erlendur Bogason. Erlendur is a true legend; he was the first to dive these geothermal chimneys and has been working as a marine researcher, underwater photographer and commercial diver in this part of the world. Strýtan is a natural wonder and is the only known geothermal chimney at a diveable depth. It was formed from a hot spring releasing water into the ocean at a depth of about 70 meters. As soon as the dissolved minerals in the hot fresh water get in contact with the cold ocean water, they coagulate and throughout the last approx. 11 000 years this process has created a 55 meter tall limestone chimney, that reaches up to 15 meters below the surface. This was quite a spectacle and amazing to see the size of this structure. On the top of the chimney we could take off our gloves and bath our hands in the hot water expelled from the top of the chimney. We did another dive in the same area on some smaller vents in shallow water and did the same thing, giving our hands some warmth from the 12°C water while looking at the diversity of marine life that is attracted to these structures.

That evening we were invited by another local diver, Siggi, to dive the ocean at the top of the Fjord. He took us out in his boat to a nice kelp forest where we swam through it like we were in a coldwater jungle. On the way back we were mesmerised by the tall cliffs with snow topped peaks either side of the fjord, when Siggi pointed out something in the distance, it was a sperm whale! Unfortunately it was dead and washed up on the rocky shore, but we took the tender over to it and had a look (and a smell!)

Our final day in Iceland was spent driving back to Reykjavik for an early flight the next day, but we needed to have one last dip in Silfra. So that evening we did some drysuit freediving in the crystal clear waters while the sun set over the beautiful landscape, it was the perfect way to end our stay on the island of ice and fire.