1-4-06 Diving

We did our checkout dive today. The dive was through an ice hole off the McMurdo jetty, which is right down the hill from us. We loaded gear and drove down there, then hauled equipment across the ice for about 50 yards to the hole. The hole was in good shape, so we popped the cover off and geared up. We took two dive tenders along to help haul the gear and put on the gear that we can't put on ourselves. The dive officer Steve went in first to see what it looked like, then came back up to tell us to suit up and come down. You suit up by sitting on the edge ofthe hole and putting all your ancillary equipment on. The last bit of kit is the dry gloves, which are a tight fit onto the suit, so you need to have an assitant put them on you. Once all that was done, I dropped in.

Suiting up:


Putting the dry gloves on:


All suited up and ready to drop in. Hello to everyone back home.


The initial descent is through a 15ft deep, 4-ft diameter ice hole filled with a lens of freshwater. The visibility is poor, and you're semi-cramped in there. Halfway down I stopped and asked myself what on earth I was doing, but after taking a deep breath I decided that indiscretion was the better part of valor, and kept descending. After dropping out the bottom of the hole into the open salt water it became a lot more comfortable. It also became rather dark. The thick ice and snow on top of it makes for very little light penetration, so we had to carry dive lights. The down rope we hung through the hole also had 3 strobe lights attached to it so that we could find it in the dark. The two ice holes in the surface are the only real source of light, so you can see them readily when looking up. The mud bottom was at 90 feet, and it was covered with all sorts of critters. They all resemble things that you see back home, but they're all slightly different and are often larger. I swam by one white sponge that was about 4ft tall and 4ft in diameter. There were soft corals, urchins, seastars, anemones, nemertean worms (big ones), sea cucumbers, jellyfish, and many other things. Unfortunately there was no camera on this dive, since it was the checkout dive. We spent about 25 minutes down there and then came up to the surface. I'm definitely going to have to do this again, and hopefully with a camera next time.