Aplysia depilans (punctata?), uvala Polje night dive

It’s strangely ironic that in 3 months of living on a Greek island I never managed to go on a proper dive. Just the thought of it was a constant source of frustration… here I was, on a beautiful island where scuba diving doesn’t extend beyond some locals with their own gear and 160 kilometers of coastline that is likely largely unexplored. The thought of uncovering new sights and wonders, natural or man-made, was burning in the back of my mind. Sadly though my underwater exploration of Ikaria was strictly limited to lung capacity and admittedly relatively shallow coastal waters.

I guess it’s all fine as long as the bottom doesn’t go much beyond 20 meters although I cannot help but think what lay beyond the immediate coastal waters. Surely there must be something, some wall that breaks the monotony of coastal sand flats and drops down into deep trenches that surround Ikaria. Or a wreck or a reef, or something. I guess it will remain a mystery to me until I return with my own gear (and hopefully manage to get on a boat).

AA guns of Cessare Rossarol

To finally get back into diving we went for a bit of weekend wreck diving with Vitez wrecks in Premantura, Croatia. I’ve been diving with twice them before and will surely return. I like their style, their expertise and the fact there are supposedly more than a hundred wrecks that sunk in the sea around Pula.

Wreck diving is very different from the more common coastal diving on walls and reefs as you dive into blue water in the middle of the sea and the profile will inevitably be a square. Which of course means a lot of hanging onto a rope while doing decompression stops. Which is boring…

Luana deco stop boredom

On reefs and walls you can at least spend that time doing more interesting stuff and the entire period of coming back up doesn’t seem so long. But if you spend half an hour exploring a ship that lies between 35 and 55m and return along the rope you will be waiting for what seems like eternity and is usually longer than the time spent at the bottom. Although after half hour spent at 12-13°C it feels nice to return to warmer water.

schools of Luana

We did two wrecks this weekend. One was Luana, a 72m long cargo ship that came to rest at 48m after hitting one of many leftover underwater mines in 1947. The other was Cessare Rossarol. An 85m WW1 Italian navy cruiser that sank to 55m, also after hitting a mine.

Cessare Rossarol, photo via: Vitez Wrecks

While the visibility on Luana was excellent it was unusually poor on Cessare and it’s hard to appreciate such a big ship if you can’t really see it. We’ll have to go back soon. Both dives lasted about an hour and required several deco stops on return. We actually did 4 of them. First one was a few minutes at 15m, the rest were according to the dive computer @ 9, 6 and 3m.

On Saturday we also did a night dive in uvala Polje on Kamenjak peninsula. Amazing dive on its own, even better as a combination with the wreck dives. Loads of scorpion fish and various species of crabs. Some cuttlefish, sea hare, congers… simply amazing.

Galathea strigosa, uvala Polje night dive

Scorpaena scrofa, uvala Polje night dive

more photos in the gallery

I’ve been home for almost a week now and very busy. So many things to do… not enough time to write a summary.

First things first:

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My beloved Columbia Beartooth GTX mid did not survive the 3 months of ordeal that is named Ikaria. Unfortunately they do not make the same model anymore, or the previous incarnation called Tigertooth (luckily I still have those around) as this was one of the best shoes I ever had. Extremely comfortable, amazing grip on rocks, very light, waterproof (although not anymore obviously) but sadly all those amazing properties must come with a downside. They are simply not durable enough to wear them on rough trails and off road everyday. The sole was very worn out and the first hole (big one on the photo) appeared after only 3 weeks on the island, followed closely by another one where the toe cap meets the leather. I tried to repair them as best I could by stitching up the leather but given the uncompromising location I only prolonged the ordeal for two more weeks. After that the holes just kept spreading and multiplying. Eventually I was walking around with what felt like a GoreTex sock with amazing breathability. ;)
Poor protection against spiky shrubs that are inevitable on Ikaria… But all that complaining somehow fades in comparison to Johanna’s footwear saga.
I still love my Beartooths though but unfortunately I can’t find a replacement pair anywhere. I guess I can wait while I still have the Tigertooths…

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This is a sketch showing what I think are almost all the routes I walked, drove or otherwise visited while on Ikaria. Obviously it is not accurate and obviously a lot of those lines were walked and driven at some point (Suzuki Jimny baby, sorry Dimitris) ;) but I wanted to keep the map simple so only one color per road/trail. And obviously we repeated a lot of them multiple times.
The background is a photograph of Road Editions map of Ikaria.

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Above is a similar sketch showing the roads driven on Samos while we were coming back from Turkey. It was easter weekend and no ferries went back to Ikaria… so what can you do but rent a car… Again, background by Road Editions.

(click to open larger) copyright Archipelagos/Jernej Burkeljca/Road Editions

This slide from my final presentation for Archipelagos is a collection of all the GPS measurements I managed to either record on my own or dig up from old reports. Most of them are mine but I wish I recorder many more…
Recorded on Garmin e-Trex legend or Qstarz GPS receiver linked via BlueTooth to Garmin Que running under Windows Mobile on Dell Axim X51v.

Which one is better?
Well, the eTrex series are nice little units, much more useful in the field compared to my own setup (which is normally used in a car not while hiking) but the one I used had some serious connection problems at times. It had problems with terrain, with vegetation, with my pockets, clouds…
This could all be excused (since the GPS does need line of sight with the satellite) but not if the Qstarz managed to stay hooked on throughout even if I carried it at the bottom of the backpack.
I can’t comment on accuracy since I don’t have anything to compare it against. Qstarz did report about 50% lower error though (but I don’t really trust those numbers).

On my last weekend I finally managed to slip underwater with a camera to take some photos of underwater photography fieldcourse but since the camera I was using was crap that takes 3 or 4 seconds to take a photo and I didn’t have any lights (a must underwater) the photos aren’t any good. To put it plain and simple – they suck… at least I saw my first Triton’s trumpet (Charonia tritonis).

Scorpaena (porcus?)

Charonia (tritonis?)

Below is the other movie I was working on towards the end… we had visits by two groups of children from schools in Perdiki and Agios Kirikos and I just basically followed them around the base and areas around it. The movie is supposed to be a short overview of what these environmental education visits are about so there’s no major editing involved. Just a nice soundtrack and voices of children in the background for a nice summer feel.

copyright Archipelagos/Jernej Burkeljca

So to end this… thank you all that made my stay on Ikaria so enjoyable and memorable! Hopefuly you know who you are. Thanks to everyone who helped out in whatever way, to everyone who picked us up when we were hitchiking (some should have the title of our regular drivers), to all that made hiking on Ikaria what it is, to everyone who cooked such nice food and everyone else that made sure I’ll come back someday. Hopefuly nobody feels left out but there’s too many of you to name and this is not an academy award speech ;)

Although the revitalization and redesign of Archipelagos website hasn’t finished there is a new section of the website that is gaining momentum. Let’s call it beta stage blog. Not all the kinks have been ironed out, there are likely to be some changes as things develop and more content finds its way online but I guess it’s far enough to make it public.

The way it works is that each member of the team is supposed to write a short summary of their work in the past week. Since we already have internal weekly presentations at the terrestrial base this isn’t much of a stretch or bother (might be more so for the marine team) and will hopefuly do a better job of informing the general public of the work being done than the old website. From what I’ve discussed and learned in the past months it became clear that most locals are aware of the organisation but in general have no idea what’s going on up here.