Today I headed out to watch my friend Addie dive. We met during our sea ice training and became friends. It was a laugh because Addie was super stoked about me being a firefighter, and of course I was extremely excited to hear about her diving in Antarctica.
We arranged that I’d go and watch her dive today.
Diving is a similar setup to fishing. A hole in a hut.
The water temperature is -1.8c, the divers have to gear up appropriately to prevent hyperthermia. They wear drysuits with multiple layers underneath.
Addie was to solo dive for 12 minutes to collect creatures and seabed samples for a science project. You could only see her briefly as she dipped into the sea water, then a fading glimmer of her flashlight until she disappeared all together.
Another diver Rob, stayed on the surface and called out her time length and other information, and constantly checked air, pressure, and the like. Communication between the two was via a radio from within her mask, you could hear Addie breath and talk underwater.
Addie returned to the surface and had to wait 15 feet below the surface of the hole to rid her body of all the extra nitrogen. They call this feeling “nark.” Addie described it to me as a similar feeling to when you’re really drunk.
I asked Addie if she ever gets scared while solo diving. To me it sounds like my worst nightmare. You’re in negative degree water, it’s pitch black. A ceiling of ice lays 175 cm thick above you, with only one exit point. Antarctic creatures surround you, including leopard seals that eat people. And above all the regulators have a tendency to freeze here, as the water is so cold.
“Nah, I really don’t get scared at all. Actually I was staying at my mum and dad’s before I came down here and ended up being in a forest in the dark. Now that scared the living daylights out of me.” Rob the other diver responded. “Well yeah, that makes sense, I mean the bogie monster lives in the forest”
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