Arctic Scuba Diving Adventure!!!

“Diving in Arctic waters will be warmer than when we dived in the Antarctic”, my buddy said, “because the warm Gulf Stream current, travels far north and warms the polar region”.  That prospect sounded inviting so I signed up for the adventure.  True enough, it was warmer diving in the Arctic, but only by 2 degrees, as my dive computer registered 30 degrees in Svalbard, an archipelago of islands far above the Arctic Circle, about 500 miles from the North Pole.

Using connecting flights through London and Oslo, I reached Svalbard’s largest town, Longyearbyen, home to about 2500 inhabitants, which is on Spitsbergen, the major island of the archipelago.  Coincidentally enough, the town is named after an American, John Longyear, who was the main shareholder of a company that mined coal from 1905.  Coal reserves dwindled and now mining is no longer the major industry, being replaced with tourism as the main engine of the town’s economy.  By the way, high on a hill, near the Longyearbyen Airport, one can see a drab concrete structure which appears to be some sort of an entrance.  Indeed, this is the site of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where millions of the world’s seeds are stored in permanent deep freeze, in case, humans might need them in the future, as protection against natural and human disasters.

We boarded the modernized MV Plancius, along with a hundred other passengers for one week of exploration among the many Svalbard islands.  Fifteen of us paid extra to scuba dive.  Unlike the 20-foot swells we experienced crossing the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula, our Arctic foray was like plying the waters of a placid lake.

Wildlife is plentiful with frequent sightings of polar bears, walruses, fox, seals, whales, and thousands of birds fluttering around breeding cliffs, swarming like bees around a hive.  Every zodiac is armed with flares and a rifle to warn, ward off and, if needed, subdue any menace from polar bears as Svalbard is home to the largest population in the world of these magnificent creatures.

In six days, I completed 8 dives. Water temps varied from 30-39 Fahrenheit and visibility anywhere from 5 feet to 50 feet.  Coldest dive was 30 degrees and longest was 61 minutes.  As in the Antarctic dive duration was limited, not by the amount of air in our 80cf steel tanks, but by our capacity to endure increasing pain, from the frigid waters, which first accost the hands and then the feet.  A few brave souls utilized wet gloves and were usually the first out of the water.  Some, with dry gloves, experienced leaks and had to call their dive within minutes. Having dived both Polar Regions, I must applaud the Dive Concepts dry glove system.  Knock on cambium of course, but these dry gloves have not failed a single time in hundreds of dives.  They are so easy to snap on and off, I cannot see why others struggle with other less functional glove systems that continually fail and produce great frustration.

At most dive sites, there was a surprising thicket of kelp, among which flourished amphipods, stars, snails, tunicates, anemones, crabs and other crustaceans and a few fish, the largest a dark sculpin-like fish at 8 inches.  We did one bottomless, open-water dive at the edge of an ice sheet, where buoyancy was difficult to manage due to the constant mixing of fresh and salt waters.  Here, ctenophores were plentiful, many like the Beroe which resemble inverts in our own Southern California waters.  Of particular interest was the pelagic opisthobranch, yes, a sea slug that lives in the water column, the Sea Angel (Clione limacina).

Certainly a dive trip to remember!  Will post photos soon.