"Houmeliina sukelta." That's, "I want to go diving," in Finnish
- Debra A. Hill, M.D.

Yes, diving in Finland. Who would think! But, in fact, it was an incredible experience and I would highly recommend it to anyone. My plans for this adventure developed quite serendipitously when getting ready for a family roots trip to Helsinki and Kuusamo where my grandparents were born.

My typical vacations are all dive oriented, and so I felt a bit "at sea," if you were, imaging an entirely land oriented tour. So to appease my passion for diving, I began exploring via the Internet the possibilities for a dive in Finland. I first went to the PADI and IANTD websites and found their Finn locations. I sent out an email asking if anyone would be interested in diving out of Helsinki on Tuesday, June 19, 2001. I had one free morning open in our fast-paced family tour.

To my surprise, I heard from several Finns who shared lots of great info about the incredible wreck diving in Finland. And, if they were not available to dive that day, they eagerly recommended friends who I should contact regarding their availability. Sure enough, I received an email from Sampsa Lilja who said he had a boat and could arrange to dive that day. Another email from Jorma Timmonen expressed his regrets but recommended I contact Sampsa. When I thanked Jorma and let him know Sampsa had already responded, I realized I had no idea if Sampsa was a guy or a gal. Sampsa probably couldn't tell from my name my gender either. Jorma wrote back, "He's a 30-year-old guy, a CMAS 1 instructor and a good diver ... have fun."

My next problem was to find a place to rent gear. For one day of diving, I was not about to bring my CS 200 crush neoprene suit, metal back plate, regulator, fins, etc., but I did want to get a dry suit that leaked through the seals. Bob Titus, when renting a suit in British Columbia, had a leak in his rented dry suit and was quite chilly - that's another hilarious story. I remember him ringing the icy water out of his dry suit underwear while shivering in the night winds in the moonlight off of Nanaimo. I sure didn't want that experience. Moonlight- yes, but being frozen to the bone - no.

Sampsa was a great help. He emailed to me a half dozen dive websites in Helsinki, complete with phone numbers and description of each one. I sent out an email to all of them with a list of the gear I needed to rent and my concerns about getting a suit with seals that fit. Kira Kaisla at NDI Water Sports responded immediately with a reassuring note that they would have everything. And when Sampsa emailed that their dive club's O2 kit was out on an archaeologic project, Kira was quick to help out. Their O2 kit was also unavailable due to being serviced, but she located one through another dive shop and said there was no rental fee for it. After several emails and late nights of organizing and packing, off to Helsinki I went.

Anticipating rainy overcast weather, I was pleasantly surprised to have found beautiful blue skies, sunshine, and a comfortable 66 degree Farenheit air temperature. I was so excited to at last be in Helsinki with such great weather, I wanted to get into the water right away. Plans had already been made to go diving Monday night. I say night because I mean around 7 p.m., but of course at this latitude in the summer, it is light until about 3 a.m., at which time it becomes "dusk" for about 2 hours. So, I thought it best to at least go to NDI Water Sports to try on various dry suits and get my rental gear organized ahead of time. When I arrived at NDI Water Sports after discovering there is a definite distinction between bike lane and walking lane in Helsinki (I nearly got run over by bicycles), I saw the words 'Divein.fi' in the window. I thought this must be fate as the name of our scuba TV series, as you know, is Dive In and our website www.divein.tv.

Kira was out when I arrived and Mary Ann, a tall, bright-eyed strong gal with short red hair smiled as she said, "You must be Debbie. I overheard Kira talking with you." She immediately asked my shoe size and showed me a couple of trilaminate dry suits to try on from Body Glove. I tried a terrific trilaminate suit with a back entry zipper, great color - black and bright yellow - and I wished Bob had been along to take underwater video as I am always telling him of the importance of brightly colored suits for video. The wrist seals fit great. It was a bit snug, though, through the hips, cut for a man, not a woman, but acceptable, and then it was time to try the neck seal. I was convinced I could not get the new latex seal over my "big head," yet the seal was cut about the same size as the one on my dry suit at home. Mary Ann kept encouraging me. She said, "I had the same problem with it. It really hurts your neck. But pull hard, it will work." With her help and a lot of cornstarch, I got it on. It was perfect. I looked like I had plunged my face into a bowl of flour, but once on, the seal fit comfortably and perfectly. I was a happy camper!-or rather happy diver! It had an attached hood like my own dry suit, which I liked as it felt familiar. It was a bit tight compared to mine, but I decided it was probably a better fit than my own, so no water would circulate in the hood which would make it a lot warmer.

Kira arrived as a I was putting my Diving Concepts ring system dry gloves onto the latex wrist seals. She jumped right in, or "dived in," to assist me with pulling and tugging to get the rings in just the right place. Kira was great. She helped with finalizing the gear and shared lots of helpful information about diving in Finland. The salinity here in the Baltic Sea is .3% as compared with 3% in the general ocean. The temperature was about 42 degrees and the visibility here is about 8 to 20 feet, very similar to Southern California diving. However, ice diving in the winter affords tremendous visibility, water as clear as gin. There are ship wrecks located along various areas in the Archipelago here. The location of NDI Water Sports is particularly good as it is right by the water making for easy access to diving. Kira does lots of teaching and says that she and her facility are truly devoted to an individualized approach to diving and teaching.

When I finally arrived in the late afternoon to get ready for our dive, we were putting gear together and I realized I had left my air integrated dive computer back at the hotel by accident. So, I announced that I was going to need a computer and a pressure gauge. Kira said no problem and pulled out a Suunto Eon, something I am very familiar with as I have dived with that in the past at home. To my surprise, however, the readings were in meters and in bar. At that point, Kira asked me what size cylinder I wanted to use on this dive and I said that 80 cubic feet would be fine. Everyone in the shop looked perplexed and said, "Well, we have one with this many liters or that many liters," and suddenly I realized I was not aware of the conversion between cubic feet and liters. Kira suggested one particular cylinder that looked like a steel 72 Faber. I could recognize it by the slope of the neck of the cylinder and she said that she had used it many times on similar dives. So at that point, I realized I was really going to dive Finnish style, meters, bar, liters and kilograms.

At the last minute, she was placing an inflator hose on the regulator for the dry suit inflator and I thought it might be a bit short and, unfortunately, when we were on the boat, I discovered that it was a bit short. We were all suited up. It was great and we were about ready to hop in. I had brought along my full face mask and was glad I did in view of the water temperature. When I pointed out to Kira the problem of the hose being too short, she said that we could certainly turn the valve a bit so that it would fit. I was concerned about that in terms of leakage. We were able to turn the valve, the hose fit, and I was able to get good inflation; however, as I had worried about, it was a source of leak. I could feel that water entering and filling up from my feet to my waist, a bit soggy, but I was warm from the waist up and very, very glad that I had the full face mask and ring seals attached to my dry gloves.

The water was a bit choppy but nothing different from Southern California diving. We were diving on the Gustav Adolf, a Swedish war ship that was sunk by Russians in 1755. As we descended, the water visibility was very much similar to Southern California (about 8-10 feet). To my surprise, I was having some trouble clearing my ears as we were descending. I did not have a cold and could not understand why that would be occurring at this time. The only thought I had later was that perhaps I had some water retention in my tissues because of all of the flying we had done and that made my eustachian tubes a little more sticky. I took my time, however, and we were able to reach the bottom.

Sixty feet, and there it was, the Gustav Adolf, sunk in 1755. We could still see the ribs of the ship, the cannons and the barrels. It was amazing. However, when we reached the bottom, I realized due to this visibility that we would probably need a reel. We had discussed this ahead of time and Kira felt that we wouldn't need one, however, had brought one just in case. I reached for the reel on her D-ring and she quickly took it off and placed it around the buoy line. As we proceeded, we realized very quickly that we did not need the reel as there had already been a permanent rope placed around the perimeter of the ship wreck that had various stations with plaques and drawings explaining everything we were seeing; however, it was all in Finn. We moved along the rope and had a total dive time of about 25 minutes.

As we surfaced, those left on the boat quickly said, "Get on board." Apparently there had been some difficulty with the water sloshing over the boat, filling it up, and the bilge pump not working. Fortunately, they discovered a wiring problem that they fixed and we got the bilge pump going.

The return back to the dock was quite fun, skimming along the top of the water with the beautiful view of the Archipelago on each side of us.

When we got back, it was 10 p.m., sunshine looking like 4:00 pm in the afternoon in the summer here in Southern California. I wanted to invite everyone to dinner in thanks for a wonderful evening of diving. I asked them to pick their favorite place. We went to a restaurant called "Colorado," a Mexican restaurant in Helsinki. Fabulous food and an interesting spot. There were several ties nailed on the wall as they cut your tie when you enter if you are wearing one and several phones, cell phones, that is. The tradition there is if you leave your cell phone on the table while you go to the restroom, when you come back, it will be nailed to the wall. Everyone in Helsinki has a cell phone, Nokia or Ericsson. That was an interesting surprise to me. When I was going over safety procedures about the radio on the boat, they announced to me, "Oh, don't worry. We all have cell phones. They're all waterproof," and the emergency number is "211," not "911" that we are familiar with here in the United States. We had a great meal, reviewed our dive, talked about all the great diving in Finland, and I made some great friends.

I definitely recommend diving Finland! I hope to go back there soon for the best ice diving around!