After the incredible yet busy time in New York I headed back to Finland to do some scientific diving, this time for my own master’s thesis project! For two weeks after I came back to Finland I got to stay at the lovely Tvärminne Zoological Station that is located on the beautiful Finnish archipelago, and also a home of the Finnish Scientific Diving Academy!

For my project I got to dive quite a bit. And during these dives we built these super cool underwater benthic incubation chambers that enable measuring different fluxes within the chamber using loggers. As a passionate seaweed fanatic, I get more than excited every time I get to dive into a shallow subtidal bladderwrack canopy to actually conduct my own research on these beautiful perennial brown macroalgae. Dives for the project included the initial site survey dives to find a suitable study site, study site set-up dives, practice incubations (very much needed as building the chambers and handling the incubation periods are hectic), and a few experiments where we ran two parallel incubations. These dives were anywhere from 50 to 90 minutes and the water temperature in the Finnish Baltic Sea coast was around 9 °C, which meant that I had the most efficient wake-ups in the mornings.

After wrapping up my field work, I headed over to the West coast of Sweden to do a course I have wanted to do for a while: a DPV course with the coordinator of the Finnish Scientific Diving Academy and an instructor from Technical Gradient Diving. During the course I got to stay with Edd Stockdale and his lovely wife and an awesome technical diver Tiffany Norberg! The course itself was super fun, interesting and full of new skills and challenges that I have not experienced before. We went through theory around DPVs and their possible usages in diving, but also in scientific diving.

I learned the basic skills like how to actually get around with a scooter, but we also did towing drills and practiced how to deal with situations where you can’t suddenly use your scooter. At the end of the course I felt confident with cruising around with the scooter, had helped build a sauna, got some awesome book recommendations and even got to meet one of the previous OWUSS European Scholars – Oscar Svensson!

Extra warm and special thank you for Edd for running the course and Tiff for hosting and letting me borrow her super cool scooter! Also have to give a shout out to the best dog, Exley for being the best alarm!

Thank you again so much to the Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society for making this opportunity possible. Also an extra warm thank you to all of my amazing sponsors Fourth Element, DAN Europe, Halcyon, Backscatter and Suunto for helping me on my journey! 

You can continue to follow my journey through blogs, or hop on my Instagram!