Why would you ever dive in the Scandinavian waters? When you can dive in tropical waters around Bali ?
Getting to and from the dive site takes hours, getting in all your equipment is a hassle and when you finally get it all on you are sweating like crazy because of all the insulation. Then you at last make it in to the water and then you are cold within minutes. How can this ever be appealing in any way, and why would anybody ever choose to get certified as a diver in those conditions?
Well for me the answer is very simple, and I think it will be hard for me to explain too, because you really have to experience it to understand it, like diving anywhere else in the world. For me I think it falls back on a number of things, that we have to plan it a bit more, which makes me, look way more forward to my dives. I think that because we often only go out 4-5 people we have the dive site for ourselves, and when you then submerge yourself in to the murky water and let the sunlight disappear as we go down the line, you are truly alone, just you, your buddy and the bubbles, this gives me a great feeling of being free and gives me time to clear my head, from whatever might be on it. Cruising along the shadows of a huge wreck and occasionally spotting a potential area to go and explore, makes me visualize what that ship looked like when it was on the surface back in its prime days. I mean of course, diving on a wreck is always awesome, but because of the abundant amount marine life that covers it, you dive it just as much for the wreck as the life, where as in the colds of Scandinavia there might be one fish on the entire wreck.
Being a diver in Scandinavia, doesn’t mean that you are crazy or lazy in anyway, it means that you enjoy diving just as much as anybody else, and dive because you want to, not because it’s super comfortable or relaxing, because the truth is, most of the time it is really cold, and your hands go numb within minutes and doing skills is often a bit more of a hassle, but hey, train hard play easy, right? So when you see a Scandinavian or cold water diver, don’t call them crazy, give them a warm welcome (they might look a bit cold) and hear one of their stories about that one time the torch ran out of battery at 15 meters and all turned black!
Do you want to hear more about diving in Scandinavia then stop by Crystal and have a talk with one of our many Scandinavian instructors!
Written by Magnus – IDC Staff Instructor from Denmark Currently working at Crystal Divers