Our last morning in Iceland involved us madly trying to dry our suits on the heaters after our late evening freedive at Silfra. We ended up getting a full 3 hrs sleep before sadly heading to the airport for our flight to Gothenburg, Sweden.
Upon arrival in Gothenburg we were greeted by a familiar face, Johan Enqvist, who we met in New York City. Johan is a mad keen cave diver and who apart from being the partner of the 2006 European scholar, Delia Ní Chíobháin, is one of the founders and managers of Oxygène International.
After a quick tour of Gothenburg and the Oxygène dive store we were driving up the coast to Lysekil. On arrival at the Oxygène Lysekil dive centre, we were greeted by all the staff, and our host and instructor, Daniel ‘Tiger’ Dahlström. For the next five days we lived with Daniel and his lovely wife Susanne and his two young children.
Johann said that he had a surprise course arranged for us for the first few days at Lysekil. We had no-idea what it could be, but we soon found out that we would be riding underwater search kites, or “dragons” as we like to call them. This is a new PADI underwater pilot specialty course developed in Sweden and only offered by three dive centres in the world!
The first two days at Oxygène were spent in the water getting towed behind the boat on the dragons. This was great fun being able to ‘fly’ underwater at 2-3 knots; we could do rolls, fly upside down and dive down to 20 m. We also got to fly close to the bottom and the steep walls, this was challenging as water was green and only about 5 meters viz with large jellyfish that we had to dodge.
Eline ended up crashing Jamie into a wall, and broke the wing of the dragon! Everyone thought it was funny and she earned the nickname ‘dragon slayer’!
We spent another day doing some fun dives and a nice night dive where I was bitten on the finger by a lobster, which was also quite funny! We spent the evenings with BBQs on a nearby island and under some large cliffs on the fjord where we did a spot of rock climbing/caving with our new friends, Andreas, Edwin and Flexz. The last day was spent with Delia and Johan, where we talked about technical diving configuration and got to have a dive with a twin set.
That evening we travelled back to Gothenburg and had dinner with Delia and the 2005 European scholar, Vibe Schourup-Kristensen. We spent the night with Vibe and the next morning she took us to Poseidon diving systems. At Poseidon we were given a tour of the building where they not only manufacture gear but also develop and test their products in two specially designed pools. We got to try out their new flexible drysuit which worked a treat and then we happened to be in the right place at the right time and were lucky enough to get to try the new Cis-Lunar Mark VI Discovery rebreather. This system was just at the final stage of completion and is the first rebreather designed for recreational divers. It was very easy to use, relatively lightweight and comfortable. This was all our first time using a rebreather and we were all really happy with it after swimming around in the pool.
After this, I left the other two scholars and jumped a bus to get back to Norway to visit an old friend from my University, Robert Ramos. He recently completed his PhD on the ageing of Port Jackson Sharks and is currently working as a dive instructor in between jobs. After a couple days with Robert, I was ready to tackle our next and final diving expedition in Scandinavia. This was the IANTD wreck diver course offered by Jesper Østergaard at Stevns Diving School, Denmark. It was not just Jesper that taught us but we were lucky to have six other instructors that were keen to help the three of us and do some fantastic wreck diving. Jesper owns a very nice house where he has rooms for guests, a dive shop and lecture room for the technical courses that he runs when he is not working full time at Copenhagen airport!
Our first day of diving consisted of some skills in relatively shallow water, and it was good fun swimming around with everyone, especially when Jesper and friends let us tear around the place on their new X-scooters!
Also participating in this course was the OWUSS Scandinavian co-ordinator Lars Kirkegaard. The Scandinavian tour with the three scholars was Lars’s brainchild and he spent a great deal of time organising these activities through his plentiful contacts in this part of the world. So for the next two days we lived with Lars and the fellow instructors, needless to say, dinner conversations were based around diving and this was a good experience for me to learn more about technical diving from these guys. We were very lucky with the weather and our first day wreck diving, we had cloudless skies without a breath of wind. This made the 15 nautical mile trip into the Baltic Sea quite memorable. We soon arrived at the wreck of the Vapper, this 115m long wreck lies between 6 and 26 m depth and was a great place to learn how to safely penetrate the wreck using reels and practice getting out while blindfolded! The following day was pretty much the same but we dived a different wreck, the Minos, which was German steamer, before the Baltic Sea claimed her.
This course finished the off the month of August and we were in need of a bit of R&R so Lars had organised for us to travel to his summerhouse in Jutland, Denmark. There the three of us could settle in and catch up on work and organise videos and photos. But it was not all rest as we were invited to visit the Kattegat Shark Centre. Apart from all the aquariums, there is dive centre operated by Teddy, a good friend of Lars’s. We were given special permission to dive in the shark tank, where we were approached by several large sandbar sharks, sand tigers, black and whitetip reef sharks, leopard sharks and morays. This day was also spent with Lars and his two business partners, Dave Bennet and Maria Bollerup from Sea Safaris, and after a nice dinner back at the summerhouse we all relaxed in the wood fired hot tub to watch the stars.
Special thanks goes out to all the hosts and friends we made in this lovely part of the world and especially Lars Kirkegaard for his planning and commitment to making sure we had a great month in Scandinavia.
