Countdown

I leave for Iceland at 9:10 P.M. on August 18th, which is one week from today! I'm getting pretty wound up, and I'm really starting to lose focus at work. Ah, who am I kidding? At one week from vacation time I finally have a valid excuse for my usual lack of focus. I've booked myself into a couple of day trips from Reykjavík, which has actually left me with only a couple days that are free while I'm there. I thought that was for the best this time since there are a lot of things that I don't want to miss. Chief amongst those was a hike on one of Iceland's numerous glaciers, so that was the first thing I locked in. I've booked with Reykjavík Excursions (www.re.is) and if you're interested in seeing what I'll be up to have a look in their "Activity Tours" section. I'll be doing two tours with them; "Take a Walk on the Ice Side" is obviously the aforementioned glacier hike, and "White River Rafting" strikes me as pretty self explanatory. I've never gone white water rafting before, so I'm really looking forward to that.

Covering events of the recent past: over the August long weekend I was in Tobermory working on my Scuba certifications. In the three days we did eight dives, five for the Advanced Open Water certification, and three more for the Deep Diver Specialty. One of the dives for the open water cert counted towards the deep diving specialization, which is why we were able to complete the specialization with three dives.

I travelled up to Tobermory with another diver who was taking the course. Pictured below in his snazzy new wetsuit is my new good buddy Arnon:

I actually met a lot of really great people that weekend, too numerous to mention here. It really was an incredible experience that I'd highly recommend to any diver with their Open Water certification. Unfortunately I didn't get a lot of pictures, largely because it was an incredibly active weekend and I was pretty tired for most of it. Also, half of our dives were off of a boat and I was feeling more seasick than I usually do. That really drains a person of their will to photograph.

The first day of diving started with a Peak Performance Buoyancy dive where we focused on getting our weight set correctly and doing exercises to test our control underwater. We did that one as a shore dive right in Tobermory. The second dive was Underwater Navigation. We did a series of exercises to test our ability to use a compass underwater. That was another shore dive that we did in a bay just outside of Tobermory, pictured here:

Love that water clarity!

We finished the day with a night dive back at the original dive site:

That was an incredibly surreal experience. You can only see as far as your flashlight beam. Even though we were in a familiar dive site, having dove there just that morning, it was a completely different dive at night. I really enjoyed that dive, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to do more night diving.

Our second day consisted of two Deep Dives, one of which counted as both an Adventure Dive for our Advanced Open Water as well as a Deep Specialty Dive, and the other was just for our deep specialization. We were diving on the wreck of the Niagara II, which was intentionally sunk a few years back to be a dive sight. It was incredibly interesting! I always think of wrecks in Tobermory being old wooden ships, so it was very different to dive down to a modern metal container ship. The wreck was deep (obviously, since we were doing deep dives there) and so we couldn't stay down for too long, but what I got to see what still incredible. We finished the day, and the Advanced course with a DPV (Diver Propulsion Vehicle) dive. For those of you unfamiliar with these devices picture a small torpedo that you lay on top of. They aren't as fast as they look, the purpose being more to save energy than to FLY through the water, but they're still a ton of fun.

Our last day consisted of two boat dives on the site of a much older wreck. The King is a wooden vessel consisting of massive timbers, the likes of which I don't imagine you could buy for any amount of money these days. I wasn't feeling great between dives, but the captain of our dive boat gave me a Diet Coke and it helped me feel better. Apparently the phenylalanine in the aspartame is an essential amino acid that works as a mild analgesic and antidepressant. I can certainly vouch for its effectiveness against seasickness.

That's all for now. I'll try to get one more post in before I leave, and from there we'll just have to see what I can manage in terms of blogging from the field. Wish me luck!