Dive Iceland, it's breathtaking!
Iceland "the unspoiled jewel" for unique and breath taking underwater and on land exploration that stuns and effects the minds of travelers and divers from all around the world. Making this statement is an easy thing to do when you have some of the most amazing dive sites in the world to work with!
The most visited dive site is of course called Silfra, situated in the National Park Thingvellir about and half an hours drive from the mother city Reykjavik. Thus making it easily accessible for doing day trips. We start packing the dive gear early in the morning and then we pick the divers up right in front of their hotel between eight and nine in the morning but we are flexible on these times, The Silfra day trip includes two dives in the fissure with a short break in between to warm up with some tea and cookies. The whole expedition lasts about seven to eight hours and divers will be dropped off at their hotels back in Reykjavik around four in the afternoon, just in time to satisfy a nagging divers stomach at one of the fine restaurants situated in the down town area. The Silfra Day Tour is often combined with the Silfra Snorkeling Tour, where snorkelers join the dives on the surface.
There is a few reasons that contributes to the uniqueness of Silfra. First of all it was and is still being formed by continental drift which is the Eurasian and American tectonic plates slowly moving apart at an average rate of two centimeters a year, This movement rips Iceland into two parts and Silfra is right in the middle of it all. The second thing that makes the dive so striking is the clear water. The water in the fissure is glacial melt water that comes from the glacier Lángjökull which is about 50 kilometers away. The melt water runs through underground through the proporous lava rock from an near by volcano. This means that it is filtrated through the essence of earths core and picks up no sediment to emerge in Silfra as pristine drinking water that contains no sediment! In fact its so clean that the visibility while diving in Silfra exceeds 120 meters guaranteed.
My first dive in Silfra is not something that I could describe easily, but I'll try. I just came to Iceland from South Africa in February 2008 to do my Dive masters here with Tobias at DIVE.IS, and many people ask me "why Iceland" and I usually reply that I was looking for something new and different and that was exactly what I got. I arrived at Keflavik International airport on a February morning and was greeted there by a really friendly face that I only knew from the diving videos that I saw on Youtube in the weeks before. Although I felt like an eight year old at first being in a foreign country far away from home Tobias made me feel right at home. So we took a little drive from the airport back to the dive center in Reykjavik where I immediately settled into my new room fully equipped with every thing I needed for the time coming. The next day it was straight of to diving for my first Silfra and also a first for diving in a dry suit. We started by packing the gear together and after that picking up a few other divers from their hotels that would be joining us for the day. The drive there was awesome as it was my first time ever being in snow and to my amazement the whole countryside was as white as a sheet! Our first stop was at the parks information center were we could get a good overview of the lake and the human scale split of the two continental plates, I observed that the whole lake was frozen over, but was pleased to find out from Tobias that Silfra never freezes because of the constant current caused by the continuous flow through the underground wells.
We got to the dive site after a short drive and after Tobias gave us the dive briefing we immediately got on with getting in to our dive gear, he then gave me a detailed explanation about how to use the dry suit and off we went into the water with my excitement reaching an uncontrollable level!!
It was like nothing I had ever seen before and the feeling stretched beyond the limits of my imagination, all the confusion of being in a new county was left behind on the surface and only me and my passion stayed behind while feeling weightless in the crystal clear waters of Silfra. The tour was spectacular and I felt pretty satisfied with my skill with the dry suit and when I got out of the water at the end of the second dive I had a huge smile on my face and that was about the only thing I could do at the time cause just the thought of me doing this for the rest of the summer season made me speechless. Wow!
Silfra Statistics: Max Depth - 20m, dive times for first dive - 35mins second dive - 30mins, water temperature is between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius, Visibility is endless or as I like to say "it depend on the quality of your mask"
It consists of different parts namely; Silfra Halls, Cathedral(deepest), Lagoon(120m viz) and for experienced dry suit divers an extra part called Little Crack.
There are some small lake trout in Silfra but nothing to get excited about, for the dive is not to see fish after all.
Another one of Iceland's unique dive sites is situated up in the northern fjords close to the biggest northern town called Akureyri, this is about 5 hours drive from Reykjavik which makes it impossible to do a day trip there, so we have we usually do this on a three or five day trip with an minimum limit of four divers per trip.
The structure or dive site is called Strýtan and it's a Geothermal Chimney that rises up from the bottom of the fjord 55 meters straight up to fifteen meters below the surface. This is the only one of its kind that's diveable by recreational divers in the world, for all the others are to deep so its pretty darn special. There is a buoy line that goes down next to the chimney and a another line that connects the two at a depth of forty meters. There are a lot of marine life and coral all around the chimney and also very interesting is the hot, sulphurous fresh water that comes out on the sides of the chimney and mixes with the cold sea water forming both vetical thermo cline and halo cline at the same time!! This combination of the two is also responsible for the structure itself. The cool thing is that you could take your gloves off an feel the hot water on your hands in the middle of an ice cold sea.
There are of course an huge variety of other dive sites all around both in the ocean and in lakes, which are also pretty amazing, including awesome wreck dives, but if I start now I'll never stop I guess.
After a day of diving you still got a lot of things to choose from to do in the evening like, the northern lights tours, or whale watching and if your in the mood for just being in Reykjavik, you could go enjoy a good local meal and afterwards experience Reykjavik's BOOMING nightlife and of course for the ladies there's always shopping to do until the shops close in the evening.
If you stay for longer you have endless possibilities to what you could do with exciting and beautiful tours that would take you months if you would want to do them all, so the question what to do would not be off relevance, rather the question what to choose from and of course that depends on your own personal preferences.
The Golden Circle tour where the famous waterfall Gullfoss and the geysers are visited is on top of the list for many visitors.
The best time to come to Iceland for diving depends on what you want out of your dives, for instance if you would want to dive in the snow and get out of water in the snow you would do it in that time, in Silfra the temperature of the water stays the same all year round. In the summer the snow is melted and the country turns into a lush green. Summer time is main tourist season that's between May and October but for me personally Iceland is at its most beautiful in the winter covered in snow.
For ocean diving in Iceland is a bit different. In the winter the visibility is better because of less plankton in the water, but that also means that there is less marine life to see. In the summer the plankton is back and the marine life bit then again the visibility is not as good.