‘DiveScrap’Index

On Friday the 25th of January 2013 Leslie Leaney, founder of the HDS USA, came to see me to stay for a week. As a ‘surprise’ my friend Rob Krul and myself we decided to organize a little diving party for Leslie but unfortunately it still was a bit of winter over here and again unfortunately Leslie arrived in Amsterdam coughing, only 2 days before the dive was planned ... Today we dived but since we could not risk seeing him pass away after catching a pneumonia we wisely decided that it was best to have Leslie stay on the dry side of the ice, but for the others the dive itself was a success. This morning Leslie and myself we drove to Rob’s place and with the help of Tim, who works at Robs workshop, we got all the gear on the waterside. Rob cut a hole in the ice and since I restored the helmet we were going to dive with, it was up to me to see if it was all right so I was dressed up first. The helmet was a German ‘Friedrich Flohr’ which I had obtained last year with the kind help of a friend who did not fancy the helmet himself when he was offered it. Two years ago I was lucky enough to obtain a genuine Fr. Flohr regulator backpack ( Lufttornister ) And last spring I found a genuine Fr.Flohr front weight when I was on the way to an HDS meeting in Finland: it was laying on the floor in a second hand shop down the road in Sweden ... The helmet had been the missing part of the equipment and after I had purchased it I restored it ( parts were either damaged or entirely cut off and the helmet was buffed like a mirror when I got it .. ) Last summer I had replaced all damaged or missing parts and the equipment was then genuinely complete, but it took until today to see if the helmet was really diveable ...

So first it was my turn, dressing up and preparing all gear at the waterside with temperatures around zero was the worst part of it but as soon as I disappeared under the water surface it got better. Visibility was good: some 3 meters but as soon I moved around thick clouds of mud got stirred up. Looking through the top window reminded me to my first ice-dive in the early nineteen eighties, when I dived ( 15 years old ) under the ice just of the shore of a town near to us called Hoorn, my parents were walking above me on the ice and were able to follow me in my red wetsuit and I could see them on top of me on the other side of the ice. Back then I had no fancy full face mask or dry suit etc., I dived with an old Nemrod regulator which I had bought second hand, and soon the ice cold water which had filled up the wetsuit started freezing me. I stayed down for about 15 minutes and then had to get back to the hole in the ice because I lost control over the muscles in my face and lost grip on the regulator. It kind of hurt back then but I was proud I did it ... Today it was all quite different. My head was safe and warm inside the helmet. I was dressed in a dry suit with woolen under clothing too: I could have stayed ‘all day’ under the ice.

But after 10 minutes I had seen enough and was sure that the equipment was up and ready for the next HDS event: the one in Bergen, Norway in June this year. So I got back up, got the gear of my back and then it was Rob’s turn. Rob stayed under for even longer then I did and seemed to enjoy himself investigating the underside of the ice ...

After Rob surfaced Tim decided to give it a try, he had dived in a swimming pool once or twice with modern SCUBA gear but never dived a helmet ever. I dare to call him courageous after having seen him going down under the ice with a surface supplied copper helmet diving equipment with a regulator at his back, a fairly unusual way to get baptized with a copper helmet ...

For security we had 2 air supplies and 2 umbilicals: 1 for the regulator back pack and a second one which we attached to the normal air connection at the back of the helmet, and that one we equipped with a MK5 air control valve. We dived this helmet as an open helmet ( not bolted to a 3 bolt suit but just placed as a ‘bell’ on a modern dry suit ) So we also needed the MK5 valve to blow out the rising water in the helmet when descending from the ladder. The dive was a success for all of us, also for Leslie who stood by at the water side.

Special thanks to Sonja Krul for joining us in the ice cold wind to take the photographs shown here below.