Elke and I joined a diving club in Linz (Police Diving Club) to have some reliable company (and get cheaper air). I’m also thinking about continuing my courses (I’d have to change the system from PADI to CMAS, however – there are some annoying exams to qualify for that).

Our “new friends” from the club are all-year-divers, so I got us some nice dry-suits from eBay so we went diving regularely throughout the winter. The water is incredibly clear – and there are no other annoying divers around.

We also had another diving holiday in Egypt, again in Sharm el-Sheik; it was great there, we had some fantastic guides and so we saw around 14 hammerhead sharks on one dive, and lots of turtles.

There is also a diving scool there, and they put their own “Maibaum” into the Attersee:

It was great fun, in the break between our two dives we had some nice things to eat…

Well. I have to write about some other stuff too, it seems most of my recent entries were about diving.

I hope there will be some interesting things in my life soon, besides diving

It was also our first dive without a guide, which was fine because we already knew the underwater landscape and we just wanted to try out our new equipment.

Yeah, new equipment… Elke went on a shopping spree and so we now have everything we need, except for the lead weights and the air tanks, which are all very heavy things and which can be rented without a problem everywhere. It was great to have some new stuff for my own, which I can get used to and feel more secure underwater because I know that I can use my equipment even with my eyes closed.

I did not take any photos, because it was nothing special to see, except for lots of perch (german: “Barsch”) , and we even saw one huge one.

Elke and I were diving again today, this time in the Traunsee. We made some photos, klick to see them on flickr!

We saw some nice fish (perch) and some curious things underwater, like this bike.

We started our diving course with the deep dive (22 meters) in the Attersee. Boy, it’s freezing down there. 4° Celsius is really cold, especially if you’re not in a drysuit. We only hat wetsuits with ice-jackets, so we were quite happy when we were out of the water again. On our second dive (high altitude diver; diving more than 300m above sealevel; the Attersee is at about 400m or so) we hat some problems, because our ice jackets were too tight and we did breathe too shallow. We emerged from the water with a blinding headache (slight CO2 overdose) and decided that we didn’t want to make our third dive (night dive) that day. The visibility was also rather bad, so I didn’t take any photos.
The next day, we went diving at the Pleschingersee, to do our underwater navigation and search and recovey course. The visibility in this mudhole is next to zero, so it was really funny to try to navigate or to find some 0.5l bottles on the ground. But it was better because the water wasn’t that cold and we went diving without the ice-jackets. We had no problems then.

So now we are nearly fully certified Advanced divers. We will take our night dive sometine next week.