A Dip in The Baltic

By Kevin Denlay, NTIT#10, EBIT#34, TDS#1,CDS#1.

Earlier this year some requests had come in to IANTD headquarters about starting up a franchise in Finland. Now with Finland being somewhat off the regular diving circuit the office was left in somewhat of a quandary as how to accomplish this. That's where I came into the picture as I just happened to be going there with my wife (who is Finnish) on family business, so I was given the honor of bringing them on line. Seeing as in the area where I live (in Oztralia) we consider the water to be REAL COLD if it ever gets down to 18 degrees C, and actually having a strong personal liking for 25/30 degrees C water with good vis, I knew that this was going to be somewhat of a different diving experience than what I was accustomed to, just how different I was soon to find out!

Having been informed that the waters had now "warmed up" in Finland and previously having never dived in a drysuit, at one stage before I left Oztralia I had debated the merits of only taking my 5mm wetsuit with me. Oh foolish me, in hindsight that would have been the height of stupidity, although I did see some hardy (crazy?) souls actually diving there in wetsuits, brrrrr! Upon arrival I found that with water temperatures between 3 degrees C and 7 degrees C when any deeper than 10msw (sure, the surface had warmed up) and visibility on most dives averaging in the 3m to 5m range (sometimes as little as 1m and occasinally up to 8m or so, and always very dark [like midnight] at depth), I initially thought that the assignment I had been given was now a "rather dubious honor" to say the least. More like, "What did I do to deserve this?" I quickly and gladly adjusted to my DUI CFX200 and other than at times having cold hands, found that this kind of diving was not nearly as bad as it first sounded. Marvelous what the right equipment can do for your outlook.

Now I know that many of you readers would think these conditions sound utterly atrocious, yet I actually got to enjoy myself after the initial shock of the first couple of dives. By the time I was leaving Finland I had become thoroughly entranced, in a perverse sort of way, at what was on offer. I suppose that the abundance of impressive wrecks we were diving, most sitting perfectly upright and many of the wooden ones dating back well into the last century incredibly well-preserved, had something to do with it.

The Baltic is a wreck diver's dream, the dreaded woodworm Terado Navalis does not exist in the low saline Baltic Sea so many of these old wooden vessels look as though if raised, could be sailed away. As a matter of fact the then pride of the Swedish navy, the famous warship Vasa, which sunk on her maiden voyage in the 1600's, when raised near Stockholm in the 1960's after spending 333 years on the bottom, was pumped clean and floated to a dock! Now Stockholm, she is truly magnificent, a relic of a bygone era. In your wildest dreams you could not conceive of the lavish intricate wood carvings, literally hundreds of figurines, that adorn the whole vessel. She must be seen to be believed!

Actually thousands of wrecks of all descriptions, many from the last century and long before, many from the WW1 and WW2 and some much more recent litter the waters of all the Scandinavian coastlines. Pity about the vis and the cold though. And for a truly unique experience one could go to Finland in mid winter where you can drive your car across the ice to the site of a wreck, cut a hole through that ice, rope off and go divin'! The Finns, hardy folk that they are, do it regularly and besides, there is always a nice hot sauna waiting when you return home.

Although most of my diving was done in the Baltic, a weekend trip to Haveri in mid Finland brought us to an old open pit gold mine full of water, the Finn's answer to Florida's 40 Fathom Grotto, although much larger and at almost 47 fathoms, somewhat deeper too. With visibility above 25mfw being between 10m and 15m almost year round, this is a very popular dive sight, even in winter when a hole must be cut through the ice to enter the water. Many unexplored man-made tunnels run off the central pit and although to my knowledge, no formally trained cave divers exist in Finland, some of the local divers, two of whom were kind enough to show me around, have explored and mapped some of the more accessible of these caves.

With the only bulk EANx available in Finland being through commercial companies like AGA (at exorbitant prices), Alternate Diving Services' portable mixing panel again came in handy. All in all, along with some basic EANx divers, six EANx Instructors and Gas Blenders (including one Instructor Trainer) were certified in the time I spent in Finland. Four were from Polarsukellus Oy, (Polar Diving Co.) the company who are now the new IANTD franchise in Finland. Their Lawrence Factor filter system had just arrived as I was leaving and laying in a corner of their huge warehouse just happened to be a Haskel booster pump that no one was using, so I think when they begin pumping gas later this year they will be pretty well set. They were my diving hosts while I was there and they took good care of me and showed me many a memorable dive. Also certified as IANTD EANx Instructors and Gas Blenders were both the PADI Director for Finland and the PADI Director for Sweden. That's one thing I can say about the people from the Nordic countries, very forward thinking and not afraid to embrace new technologies. It's a pity some folks in the rest of the world could not be so open minded!

Oh, and by the way, my last dive in the Baltic was from a private boat about 15 km off Helsinki, when at about 8 p.m. (long summer days) just as I was about to descend down the anchor line, damned if the dive boat didn't sink!!! Needless to say, with typical Finnish efficiency, the coast guard were there to pluck us from the sea within about 25 minutes, but as I bobbed around the chilly Baltic waters with dusk slowly approaching, I was extremely thankful once again that I was wearing my drysuit, not a wetsuit!