Water starts crytallize when temperature is below 0. Cooling, water behaves like many other liquids, it is reducing its specific volume. But at 4 ° C (more precisely, 3.98 ° C) occurs the crisis condition: when the temperature decreases further the amount of water is not decreasing but increasing. From this particular moment the ice structure starts forming. It means that the temperature of water in the frozen lake or river cannot be less than 4 degrees. Moreover, you can definitely dive there, but using a special suit of course.
We did it almost one year ago, 7 or 8 of March 2010, in a small lake not far from Novomichurinsk, Ryazan region in Russia ( Sadko). One of our friends, dive guru Igor Ermakov invited us to his place to teach us the basics how to use dry suit and how to swim in the close/confined space.
Dry suit and technic of swimming is something completely different that the regular. You have understand how to keep you body horizontally, how to inflate and deflate the air into the suit, how to manage your fins. We did 3 or even 4 one hour dives during 2 days but I cannot say we are experts now. It still requires training and training.
Was it cold? Not really:) All you body is covered, except the mouse, moreover you can put on whatever you like, worm underwear, like for skying, socks, pants, etc. But when you come out from the water, you really cannot feel your lips:) they are completely frozen.
Underwater, or even underice life is very sleepy. We sow some fish which was swimming very slow and looked like be easily caught by hands.
But to be honest there are nothing to see there anymore. This skill, I mean, dry suit and close space swimming, can be used only for cave diving in the future.
Some pictures of frozen us are here
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Sunday, August 29, 2010
California
Words Holidays and diving mean completely the same for us, that is why it should not be wonder we take any opportunity to discover a new underwater world. This time it happened in California. We were in the US for 3 weeks and we could not skip this very important action. We book daily trip with 3 dives on calboatdiving.com (I should notice these are nice guys with quite good service). We came on the eve to Ventura harbor and slept on the boat. All rent equipment was ready on board. Early morning we start the journey to Channel Islands. Unexpectedly for us it was too cold, not more then +18 degrees (Celsius) outside and I was really nervous about water despite the 7mm of the suit. After the jump the computer showed 14 degrees…quite chilly but possible to swim for an hour.
Knowing that California is one of the few places were it is possible to admit kelps we were very impressed of the beauty we discovered under the water. It remind a huge forest with long grass stalks looked like trees trunks. Between kelps were a variety of orange and green fish, lobsters, huge crabs, little bit away from the thicket we were lucky to watch a sea lion hunting.
We made 3 dives close to the nice rock with many birds on top of it. Spectacular views, nice people, good dives=) California is definitely the right place that should be written as a reference in a log book of any diver!
Knowing that California is one of the few places were it is possible to admit kelps we were very impressed of the beauty we discovered under the water. It remind a huge forest with long grass stalks looked like trees trunks. Between kelps were a variety of orange and green fish, lobsters, huge crabs, little bit away from the thicket we were lucky to watch a sea lion hunting.
We made 3 dives close to the nice rock with many birds on top of it. Spectacular views, nice people, good dives=) California is definitely the right place that should be written as a reference in a log book of any diver!
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Diving on Maldives
Maldives impressed us less that we had expected, but anyway diving with mantas and snorkling with whaleshark make us forget about 24 hours flight and amount of money paid for very short holidays.
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