Vertical Underwater Current

Sometimes unpredictable forces of nature can turn a pleasant day of diving with a friend into a scary, even dangerous experience. This blog post is an account of a dive that I did quite a few years ago, a dive that did not go as well as it should have.

It was a beautiful sunny day in early August, and my dive buddy and I were planning an easy dive from a rocky shore in Porkkala in Southern Finland, not too far from where I live. It is a popular dive spot because it is usually an easy site to dive and it is easily accessible.

Salema porgy (sarpa salpa)

Salema porgy is a species of bream that is relatively common in the subtropical area of Eastern Atlantic (coasts of Northern Africa and Spain) and in the Mediterranean. It is also found in the Indian Ocean, in the coastal waters of South Africa and Mozambique. It is a shoaling fish, which means that it swims in large schools to avoid predators. Its size is 20 to 50 centimetres long.

This is a school of salema porgys that I spotted when I was doing some cave diving near Kalithea in Rhodes. A couple of saddled seabreams swimming in the same school also made the right hand corner of the picture.

Moorish Idol (Zanclus cornutus)

Here's a nice little fish I spotted while diving in the Similan Islands in Thailand some years back and managed to get a photo of . I encountered it near North Point, close to island number nine. Very dramatic scenery there, by the way, marvelous canyons and huge magnificent boulders of underwater rock!

The Moorish Idol (Zanclus cornutus)

Pike, the Great Freshwater Predator

Pike (Esox Lucius)

The pike is a relatively large carnivorous fish found in fresh waters all over the World in the northern hemisphere. It lives in fresh water, but can also be found in brackish water of the Baltic Sea.

Photo:Wikipedia

Pike are olive green or brownish in colour, with a white belly. The flank is marked with yellow spots contrasted by dark spots on the fins. The pike can grow to well over twenty kilograms in weight and 150 centimetres in length. They can live for more then twenty years. The largest and oldest pikes are always female.

Bladder Wrack (fucus vesiculosus)

Finally, after a long wait, I have the time to write again! I'll start this autumn by writing about the bladder wrack. So why write about a simple sea weed? The bladder wrack is an important part of its eco-system, it has commercial implications, and it has medicinal qualities. So it is not simply a plant growing on the bottom of the sea.

Bladder Wrack, reaching for sun light

THREE GREAT 18th CENTURY WRECKS

The Finnish coast of the Baltic Sea is truly a wreck diver's paradise. For centuries, trade ships have sailed along the coastal waters on route between Russia and central Europe, despite the Gulf of Finland being a dangerous, stormy sea filled with treacherous, often uncharted rocks that are hidden just under the surface.

Along the centuries, storms in the rocky, unpredictable waters of the Baltic have sent literally hundreds, if not thousands of ships to the bottom of the sea. In the 18^th century alone, dozens of ships were claimed by the sea near the Finnish coast. Many of the wrecks have already been found, and even more still lie at the bottom of the sea, waiting to be discovered.

Beginner's Guide to Diving, part 3: Dealing With Problems Underwater

I started writing this Beginner's Guide to Diving series to those who are interested in scuba diving, but are not divers yet. It has been some time since I wrote the first and second parts of this ”guide”, but here, at long last, is the third part.

In part one I wrote about how to get started with scuba diving, and in part two, some thougths about what it takes to be a diver, as well as some information about basic equipment needed. In this third part, I'll try to give some ideas about dealing with possible problems underwater once you actually get to go diving.