Film: The invisible river

Click the image to view the film. (accessible through July 10, 2013.)

Swedish television just aired a documentary about a cave diving project, “Bjurälven”, in the north of Sweden. Due to extremely high water flows, the cave is only accessible for divers in the winter time. Which in northern Sweden can be quite cold. As you can imagine, this makes exploration of the cave quite difficult. As an example, the team has developed special heaters just to keep the regulators from freezing up.

More information on Expedition Bjurälven can be found here.

On the second try we spotted a car.

Oh dear, long time since the last posting. I refuse to give up, although i haven’t been able to diving as much as i hoped. I guess that comes with being a parent

Yesterday it was finally time to go diving again, so I joined some friends from the dive centerwho were about to try out a new (at least to us) dive spot. An old quarry in Kolsva, where they used to mine for feldspar between 1894 and 1954.

Since this place is basically a round hole filled with water, with sometimes poor visibilty, navigation was a bit tricky. We really had to be careful not to swim in under cliff overhangs or into other openings/tunnels in the rock.

The dive site description was not very detailed and on our first dive we didnt see anything intersting at all!

Luckily, some locals arrived during our surface interval and gave us a better description of where to find the interesting stuff. So after downing a couåle of grilled burgers, we entered again and did much better. This time we found a couple of ditched cars, which gave a chance to hone my underwater modeling skills. I’ll leave it to you to judge if you think I might have a future in it

All in all we had a great day, and probably will come back another time!

photos by Jonas Holm

The biannual ice dive

On Saturday I went ice diving. It is now two years since I got certified and this time I joined another group taking the PADI ice diver course. I brought my camera and came away with this short video showing how much fun we had despite the cold water. We actually had -1°C!!

Best dive of the year 2012: The seal encounter [video]

 

Recently I was asked to identify my best dive of 2012. This time it was easy. The seal encounter during my trip to Väderöarna on the Swedish west coast. It was amazing!

Towards the end of a dive at “Trolleskär” my buddies saw the seal of which I, the only one of us carrying a camera, only caught a glimpse of. Camera was off of course…

Hoping that the seal would return I turned on the camera and we lingered in the same spot for a few minutes. Finally we gave up and continued the dive.

However, at the safety stop, one of my buddies is deploying his SMB, with me filming for future reference and feed back, luck strikes for real!!

The very curious seal returned and circled us, nibbling at our fins. What an experience! Although only a couple of seconds on film, it felt much longer in real time. Definitely the best dive of 2012 and a great reminder of the adventures that can be found below the surface!

So, which was your best dive of 2012?

Videos: World class free diving

Being grounded by a nasty cold for the last couple of days, what else can you do but surf the web for some diving inspiration? Luckily there is no shortage of photos and videos out there for me to indulge in, so many thanks to all of you for sharing your stories!

Just a couple of days ago the documentary “Breath”, about world record freediver William Trubridge was released (you can read more about it here http://bit.ly/R7iMS2). However, I wanted to share with you two other short videos featuring the same diver. Above is Mattew Browns beautiful short film “Hectometer”, documenting Trubridge’s 101m world record dive in the constant weight no fins (CNF) category. And here is a link to Nicholas Rossier’s documentary portrait “The Last Breath- The story of William Trubridge“. I hope you enjoy!

/K