Icediving in St. Anton with Divesport München
One of the reasons we started diving, was that we would love to one day go and dive in the Arctic or even Antarctic regions of the planet. That pretty much makes ice diving experience a necessity, if not at least a pretty sensible course to take and built experience upon.
After more seasoned divers we talked to were not touching the idea with a bargepole, we finally found out that our closest dive school here in Munich does regular trips to the wintery Alps and offers ice diving courses.
Said and done, we signed up and headed south in January.
After a welcoming drink of locally brewed Schnaps at the much recommended guest house "Bierhäusl", run by the lovely people Claudia and Franz, we enjoyed a great dinner with a mix of nice people from as far as Frankfurt and even France ("Allo, Allo, Nico!").
The next day, three seasoned dive instructors and about ten interested guys and gals were enjoying a relaxed theory session before we packed out to a nearby gravel pit.
Upon arrival, dive-instructor Jerome tied himself to the rope and went out on the ice - a couple of small jumps and more confirming ice screw tests later, the ice was declared safe enough to drive a small car over - which we didn't, but you get the idea - we had positively safe ice!
We began by pitching the tent, and by measuring a ten, 20 and 30 meter radius from soon-to-be triagonal hole in the ice, and cleared the snow from the ice in those circles, followed by a number of lines/slices running towards the middle (the entry/exit hole).
Beautiful sunshine over the Alps was thrown in for good measure and at least psychologically gave the crazy poor wetsuit divers in our group something to warm their blessed hearts with :-)
As for Nadia and I, we were "last in (on Saturday), first in (Sunday)". Unfortunately, the sun had already set while we were awaiting our turn to dive, but given there was practically no visibility anyway, it made little difference :-)
Luckily, we stayed more than toasty warm and very dry in our drysuits (Waterproof Draco), and another team member also had the same model and reported good things. It is in these kind of situations you want quality drysuits and nothing to leak, at all!
BTW: We thoroughly enjoyed our maiden dry-glove dive - and can point out to non-believers that toasty fingers are a HUGE plus when diving in Alp lakes.
The first dive was done with Diver A being the rope leader, Diver B attached to Diver A by a buddy/body-line and then one of the three dive instructors swimming along. Depth was kept to only a few meters (after all, what's the point of ice diving if you're going to 20m?) and rope commands were trained and exchanged with the surface line support person.
After about 20 minutes, a return to the hole was made, the rope leadership switched and the second dive began.
Whilst none of us had more than 2 meters of green-murky-viz to write home about, I believe we were all without exception positively thrilled about the ice diving taster-experience.
For a bit of fun, the nearby town offered a great deal - a Gondola trip to the mountain restaurant, a rental Rodel (fast sled-thingy), a beer (or other non-alcofrolic beverage) and a generous helping of Ripperl (Austrian Spare-Rips - beats the Barbeque-dripping-standard-stuff by far). After two hours on the hut, a 6.5km lit-up ride awaited us - I don't think anyone in the group had had as much fun for a long time - absolutely HILL-arious! :-)
The second day, the weather had changed completely. The former wonderful mountain in the background was lost to a white-washout. Heavy snowing, albeit a little bit less cold.
Given we were last in the previous day, we were the lucky ones to be first in today and to break the ice. It sure sounded like floating in glas of G&T with oddly shaped ice cubes. Great fun :-)
Again we practised the rope commands and switched rope-leading roles, before we then practised the emergency bail-out. Three pulls, three confirmation pulls, another three pulls and then you're off in a hurry as the rope-manager on the surface pulls bth divers (plus the instructor in this case) out in a snap.
All in all, we had a great time, but pretty much no visibility and absolutely no orientation. When you can not see two meters, you can't see the light coming through the surface-"spikes".
Thanks to Divesport Munich - fantastic team and we'll be back!
PS: Everyone - get dry-gloves! Seriously, it's the best thing since Cousteau's bubble-maker-machina. We got the SiTech Glove-Lock QCP System and love it!
PPS: Bob Evans of Force Fin was kind enough to send me a pair of SD-1's in time for the ice diving course. Unfortunately I not get any video clips of the fins in action or anything decent photographed underwater due to the truly bad visibility (see gallery), but even in minus ten degrees celsius they were still bendy and flexible, and the buckles held up very well to the cold. One possible addition would be the add-on of "Icebug"-style metal spikes to walk with them on slippery ice ;-) but actually the felt part attached to the bottom of the fin did make it slightly less slippery already, which works especially well on wet rocks(!). We look forward to testing them in our next dive adventures in more detail, but are already convinced we'd like to keep a pair permanently. Just got to work out a price with Bob, and then we'll hopefully be diving a lot with these this year! See our gallery below for some more shots of the ice diving as well as the Force Fin SD-1's! Also see the SD1 gallery if you are interested to see more shots of the new Force Fins.
