After another 2 months on the road, my feet finally touched Norwegian ground. It felt really good seeing fjords, mountains and Norwegian milk chocolate again. Will Arlidge, the Australasian Rolex Scholar, was waiting for me at the airport, and it was awesome to get together again. We hadn´t seen each other since the Rolex Award Dinner in New York City last April, so the first day was basically spent sharing stories and laughing at each other´s blunders from our travels so far. Like my fantastic idea of bringing a 5mm wetsuit to South Australia in the middle of winter. Some would call it brave, I still feel like an idiot.
The following week we were going to rock around an amazing dive area called Gulen, draining the brains of talented UW photographers. The Nordic Photo Event is run by the famous Alexander Mustard, along with Christian Skauge, the Editor of the Norwegian diving magazine Dykking, and the OW-USS Scandinavian coordinator and former Business Manager of DYK, Lars Stenholt-Kirkegaard. The event was hosted by Gulen Dive Resort, and the owners Ørjan and Monica are absolutely awesome. They are quite lucky to run a dive resort in one of Norway´s top ten dive areas (if not THE best), and I was no doubt proud to show Will this part of Norway.
The workshop comprised of lunch and evening lectures, 2 boat dives a day (with unlimited dives on the house reef), picture review sessions and a special guest lecture given by the current world champion of UW photography, Espen Rekdal – who is Norwegian! It was very inspiring to see some of his work, and it is amazing how productive such workshops are. You get your head full of ideas and visions that you can bounce off the other participants, and continue working on them throughout your diving career.
After a day of catching up and meeting all the other participants, we were ready for some serious Norwegian cold water diving – and our first stop was the wreck of SS Fernedale and Parat. The story behind the wrecks makes it a very special site (I am not going to write about it here, so you´ll have to look it up – sorry!), and Will was obviously looking forward to it –>
Even though the weather forecast did not look promising for wreck diving, we managed to visit both the Fernedale-site, Frankenwald and Bandak during the event. All the other photographers were way above me and Will´s level, but we found comfort in the fact that it is an excellent learning situation when everyone else is more experienced than you, and we both got a couple of nice shots during the workshop. The picture below is one of my best shots, taken of a jellyfish being eaten by an anemone. Since it was stuck in someone else´s jaws it gave me heaps of time to compose the picture I wanted.
This next one is taken by Will, and I love it. Not because it clearly shows that I rock, but because the green is amazing, and it looks like the diver is soaring in outer space.
The week was all in all a fantastic experience, both diving wise, learning wise and socially. When you gather that many interesting people in one spot it is doomed to be awesome. At the end of the event we all dressed up in viking costumes and nailed an epic photo of the group, which was a worthy closure of the week. We of course did an OW-USS one too, and I have posted both for you here. Next stop is the UK and an entirely new world of diving – so stay tuned!
