Joachim and Maria, the couple behind eaze-eaze, picked me up at 8 in the morning from our parking lot and we headed off. We met up with the others north of Tampere after around 2 hours of driving, approximately at the halfway to Kaatiala Quarry. Little bit of shopping for supplies and then we're off.
2 hours later we arrive at the Kuharanta hotel where we'll be staying and drop off some luggage and head right to the quarry :)
"Ottering" it.. |
Common roach |
The difference between the roach and the perch was quite substantial, where the perch is a carnivorous fish the roach are not and the posture of the hunter and the hunted was very clear. You can dive up to half a meter of a perch and it will just raise it's spiny fins at you, telling you not to come any nearer, or else... But if you try to swim close to a school of roach, they will never let you approach within 2 meters or so, you feel like one of the sharks on documentaries trying to catch mackerel in a large school, always surrounded by a clear water bubble.
Perch |
Did notice an interesting thing tho, Close Encounters isn't nearly as thrilling today as it was when I saw it as a kid :) I remember being freaked out about strange lights for months after seeing it.
"Airplane" |
There used to be a model airplane ( I think it's an old aerial target that was towed for AA practice ) that hung suspended in the water "flying" but it's now on the bottom. Since it took us quite a bit of time to get down we only had a short bottom time and didn't check out anything else that time. A big suprise was that the car ( yes, a whole car chassis ) had been moved and wasn't anywhere to be found :) Later we did some more dives around the shallow end and then headed back to the hotel for a nice meal, or so we thought, the hotel kitchen had closed at six so we headed off to Neste service station fast food again :)
Had a great evening, a couple of beers, lots of talking and laughing. It must have been 2am or so before we went to sleep, divers really should sleep more I guess. Woke up energized in the morning, hotel breakfasts are magic :)
On sunday we did our best dives of the weekend, first a couple dives in the shallow end and then we finished off with a humongously awesome deep end dive. Everyone was down to their last minutes of no decompression limits. We went down to the bell and headed off to the tourist cave, after a short tour inside we returned to the bell and realized everyone still had 100+ bars of air so we decided to make a short trip to the little entrance also, after a brief visit we returned to the bell and started our ascent.