This is the second part of our Beaufort Sea diving expedition story. Exhausted from the previous days travel it’s hard to pull myself out of bed. We use the community bathroom down the hall witch at this point doesn’t sound very appealing. We have to make sure we get to the cafeteria before they stop serving breakfast. Each one of us drags in at different times. Again the food is both plentiful and delicious. I savored my first cup of coffee as I devoured my breakfast.
Once everyone was finished eating we discussed dive details. For most of us this was a “been there done that” event but for some of our team it was a completely new adventure. One of the only real hard and fast qualifications for this type of diving is the ability to remain calm while diving in an overhead environment. This type of diving isn’t always easy
Polar Ice Diving Heli-Pad
to come by and for many of our northwest dive team members what this meant was some type of wreck diving. The other forms of overhead environment diving common to the lower latitudes would be Cavern/Cave Diving and Ice Diving where available.
We finished our last cup of the black gold, climbed into the clumsy garb necessary to stay warm in this environment and headed over to the airport where our dive gear has been stored (outside) at 30 degrees below zero. We are able to move it into a small airplane hanger where it’s warm. We unpack the equipment and insure it’s ready to take out to sea.
Diving under a polar Ice Cap can mean that for miles there is no other exit from below the ice than where you entered. Most of the gear a diver wears this far north is not much different than the gear we normally wear in the Pacific Northwest. I wear the same drysuit, the same tanks, Etc. The only real changes I make are the following. I “environmentally protect” my regulator which is to say that the regulator is protected from the open seawater by enclosing the areas where water usually floods in by covering them with an oil filled cap. This prevents the seawater from freezing inside the regulator and ceasing its functionality. I wear an “arctic grade” undergarment so it’s a little warmer than usual and we all wear full face masks so we don’t have to rely on frozen lips to seal a regulator in our mouths.
After insuring that all our gear is serviceable we repack it and stage it for the next day’s journey to the ice camp.Read part three of our Beaufort Sea adventure next.
