Going Under the Ice - 26img
Taking SCUBA under the ice can be very dangerous, for obvious reasons. Typically, if a dive goes wrong, the way out is always up, but with a solid surface overhead, that's not so anymore. The water rescue team set up an ice dive Saturday for a few members to brush up on skills, and for one member's first ice dive. I didn't get to go under, unfortunately, but I did get some pictures from the surface. 
Enjoy!
Low visibility is often a problem in all sorts of dives, whether the surface is solid or not. In ice diving, if one were to somehow become untethered and disoriented, getting back to the one hole to open air can be quite a feat if it's not in sight. So before we cut the hole, we shovel out giant arrows pointing home. Hopefully a diver lost under the ice could spot these arrows overhead and find their way back to the surface.
A few weeks back we tried doing an ice rescue class in Willow, and were faced with ice more than three feet thick. Hours of cutting got us a shallow hole which we accidentally filled with water, but we were able to train anyway. In this case, the ice was close to 20 inches thick, so our short chainsaw bars would barely cut it. We swapped our stihl out with a 25 inch bar, and managed to make a nice hole with a moderate amount of work.
Most of these chunks are free-floating. Cliff, on the right, accidentally stepped across the line at one point. Nimble feet saved the chainsaw (which we borrowed from the fire department) from being the goal of a recovery effort. :rofl
Our dive chief (on the left) is rather handy with machinery. He built the claw we use to pull the ice chunks out. Some of these were a bit large, but we managed to clear the hole.
Tools of the trade, slightly out of frame. :thumb
Now we meet the divers. Casey is a firefighter, water rescue tech, and working his way back to the paramedic level he was at previously. This is his first dive under the ice.
I haven't actually asked what Mike does for a living, but he casually comments on how "we used to do" dives under the ice, so I'm assuming he at least dove professionally at one point.
Walt spent a long time on the state trooper dive team. You can tell by looking at him that he's got stories worth listening to.
The rest of the group helped out in various other ways. Dick and myself were tenders, holding the ropes that connect our divers to the surface.
My wife is the newest member of the water rescue team. She was instrumental in the delivery of hot chocolate to the divers.
Jackson didn't actually want to get wet. At one point I pushed him in, but he launched himself off the lip of the hole and cleared the entire thing in the air. I got him later though. :rofl
An ice dive takes hours of preparation from everyone involved. Here, Walt checks over his equipment, making sure it's all in working order. An interesting difference between winter and summer diving is that if you test your regulator on the surface during the winter by taking a few breaths, you run the risk of freezing it open, leaving it free-flowing without stopping. The same is true of the inflator valves on buoyancy compensators. A member of the team a few years back had a BC inflator valve freeze open on him, sticking him against the bottom of the ice with a bloated BC. :huh Getting your equipment under water before putting air through the valves helps prevent this.
Of course another obvious difference between cold water and the crystal blue of the tropics is the necessity for drysuits. There is no water in Alaska that's not in the "cold water" category, outside of the occasional hot spring.
At this point the serious work began, so I got less pictures, but I did manage to snag a few of the divers in the water. Here's Walt, with Dick tending.
It may seem less glamorous, but the job of a tender is just as necessary as that of the diver. Neither one does much good without the other. The knot says Walt is thirty feet out into the black.
A newly utilized piece of equipment for us is the full facemask, which makes the use of audio communications possible. Joe mans the radio, talking to walt on the other side of the ice. I'm not sure how they managed before, rope tugs simply can't communicate all the various issues that can come up on a dive like this. :scratch
In a rescue operation, we'll always have three divers. One in the water, one ready to jump in, and one standing by ready, but not necessarily masked up. Each of these divers also needs a tender. This means we have to have a lot of responders to an emergency when the call goes out. :rofl
Preparations for Casey to go in, the last diver of the day. Part of the tender's job is making sure the diver doesn't have to do any work, be it lifting his tank onto his back, putting his fins on, or checking out his gear. The diver has enough to worry about already, so the less load on him, the better.
Casey is almost ready. Walt will be the "90 percent diver" for this dive.
When spring comes and things warm up, ice melts in vertical columns, eventually breaking down into what is called "candle ice". You can see the beginnings of it in the chunks we pulled out. Not quite enough to be unsafe, but it's almost the time of year for cars to start going through.
Casey moves under the ice, with Jackson looking on intently.
That's about all the excitement I have from a Saturday of diving, but here's a couple shots I saw and liked.
The ice claw sat on a cube for a couple hours, soaking up the sun's rays and melting itself deeper in. Things like this are interesting to me.
This plane landed nearby, and I liked the feel of this shot.
And of course, I did say I managed to get Jackson in the hole. :rofl A dog has a bit of trouble climbing out onto the ice, though, so here I am going in to save him. :rofl Shot by my wife, Tracy.
Enjoy!Low visibility is often a problem in all sorts of dives, whether the surface is solid or not. In ice diving, if one were to somehow become untethered and disoriented, getting back to the one hole to open air can be quite a feat if it's not in sight. So before we cut the hole, we shovel out giant arrows pointing home. Hopefully a diver lost under the ice could spot these arrows overhead and find their way back to the surface.
A few weeks back we tried doing an ice rescue class in Willow, and were faced with ice more than three feet thick. Hours of cutting got us a shallow hole which we accidentally filled with water, but we were able to train anyway. In this case, the ice was close to 20 inches thick, so our short chainsaw bars would barely cut it. We swapped our stihl out with a 25 inch bar, and managed to make a nice hole with a moderate amount of work.
Most of these chunks are free-floating. Cliff, on the right, accidentally stepped across the line at one point. Nimble feet saved the chainsaw (which we borrowed from the fire department) from being the goal of a recovery effort. :rofl
Our dive chief (on the left) is rather handy with machinery. He built the claw we use to pull the ice chunks out. Some of these were a bit large, but we managed to clear the hole.
Tools of the trade, slightly out of frame. :thumb
Now we meet the divers. Casey is a firefighter, water rescue tech, and working his way back to the paramedic level he was at previously. This is his first dive under the ice.
I haven't actually asked what Mike does for a living, but he casually comments on how "we used to do" dives under the ice, so I'm assuming he at least dove professionally at one point.
Walt spent a long time on the state trooper dive team. You can tell by looking at him that he's got stories worth listening to.
The rest of the group helped out in various other ways. Dick and myself were tenders, holding the ropes that connect our divers to the surface.
My wife is the newest member of the water rescue team. She was instrumental in the delivery of hot chocolate to the divers.
Jackson didn't actually want to get wet. At one point I pushed him in, but he launched himself off the lip of the hole and cleared the entire thing in the air. I got him later though. :rofl
An ice dive takes hours of preparation from everyone involved. Here, Walt checks over his equipment, making sure it's all in working order. An interesting difference between winter and summer diving is that if you test your regulator on the surface during the winter by taking a few breaths, you run the risk of freezing it open, leaving it free-flowing without stopping. The same is true of the inflator valves on buoyancy compensators. A member of the team a few years back had a BC inflator valve freeze open on him, sticking him against the bottom of the ice with a bloated BC. :huh Getting your equipment under water before putting air through the valves helps prevent this.
Of course another obvious difference between cold water and the crystal blue of the tropics is the necessity for drysuits. There is no water in Alaska that's not in the "cold water" category, outside of the occasional hot spring.
At this point the serious work began, so I got less pictures, but I did manage to snag a few of the divers in the water. Here's Walt, with Dick tending.
It may seem less glamorous, but the job of a tender is just as necessary as that of the diver. Neither one does much good without the other. The knot says Walt is thirty feet out into the black.
A newly utilized piece of equipment for us is the full facemask, which makes the use of audio communications possible. Joe mans the radio, talking to walt on the other side of the ice. I'm not sure how they managed before, rope tugs simply can't communicate all the various issues that can come up on a dive like this. :scratch
In a rescue operation, we'll always have three divers. One in the water, one ready to jump in, and one standing by ready, but not necessarily masked up. Each of these divers also needs a tender. This means we have to have a lot of responders to an emergency when the call goes out. :rofl
Preparations for Casey to go in, the last diver of the day. Part of the tender's job is making sure the diver doesn't have to do any work, be it lifting his tank onto his back, putting his fins on, or checking out his gear. The diver has enough to worry about already, so the less load on him, the better.
Casey is almost ready. Walt will be the "90 percent diver" for this dive.
When spring comes and things warm up, ice melts in vertical columns, eventually breaking down into what is called "candle ice". You can see the beginnings of it in the chunks we pulled out. Not quite enough to be unsafe, but it's almost the time of year for cars to start going through.
Casey moves under the ice, with Jackson looking on intently.
That's about all the excitement I have from a Saturday of diving, but here's a couple shots I saw and liked.
The ice claw sat on a cube for a couple hours, soaking up the sun's rays and melting itself deeper in. Things like this are interesting to me.
This plane landed nearby, and I liked the feel of this shot.
And of course, I did say I managed to get Jackson in the hole.
:rofl A dog has a bit of trouble climbing out onto the ice, though, so here I am going in to save him. :rofl Shot by my wife, Tracy.
John Borland
www.morffed.com
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ann
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Awesome series. Thanks for sharing.
Makes me feel safe to have all you guys just a stones throw away from my house... Man, you wouldn't have gotten me out on Wasilla lake right now for anything- so thanks for being so brave. I have been watching various people out there thinking they were all crazy, since I thought the ice was already bad. (It is starting to look like it is getting there, but you showed me that I was premature in my thinking!
Anyway, looks like quite the process and lots of work. How often does local FDepts have to do actual dives in life situations? I know on Big Lake they all drive on the ice like it is the highway with stopsigns and everything, but I have never heard of anyone going under...
I sure am glad you guys are prepared for it, though
Really great shots too! Like I said before.... interesting!
Not all that often really, but when it DOES happen, they need somebody trained for that particular type of rescue or they're in a really bad spot. Heck, they're already in a really bad spot, since our service area is the size of West Virginia, and we have 20-some responders.
Ann: Jackson (the dog) belongs to Joe. He was having a good old time all day playing around with the bubbles coming up through chainsaw holes and such. We threw him in because he was so curious already, running around the hole looking in, biting the floating ice, and such. He wasn't bothered much.
Thanks everybody for your comments! I always appreciate any feedback and replies!
www.morffed.com
system. Those 4000 psi doubles are sweet. Plus it's a whole lot easier to
work with them vs. their AL 80 (same capacity, just higher pressure).
www.Dogdotsphotography.com
In the arctic; sand is used to cut through gigantic holes in the ice, if a whale is hiding (dead) under that ice.
I have just never figured out how they know the exact spot to "cut" !
The Inupiaq people claim they can smell through 10 feet of ice @ sub zero temps, I find that statement to be most bizarre.!!
Great photographs, great series of something unique and different !!
5 stars !!
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I've never heard of using sand to cut ice, but it's very abrasive so I can see how that would work. I'd love to see it done.
www.Dogdotsphotography.com
I don't know if it would work, where you live, only because, you do not have 24 hour sunlight. The process is simple, it has nothing to do with abrasion, or such, I even imagine that something "black" might work as well , I do not know, but the technology behind this is very simple.
We just wait,.. .. the sun does all the work, it heats that sand up, and it sinks, & sinks, and sinks, as long as the sun is on that sand ( up here 24/ 7)
It keeps doing deeper and deeper !!
The Inupiaq way.. .. is to wait ! watch, look !!
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I never thought of letting the sand just sit there and let the heat from the sun melt away at the ice. My thought was more in the sand used as an abrasive rub like sandpaper attached to something.
Sun....24 hrs of sun in the winter would be marvelous
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At that point I'd just go to closed circuit. It's the way of the future
Thanks a bunch for the comments everyone!
www.morffed.com
24/7 in the summer, right?
In Point Hope we have it @ mid May
In Barrow they have it sooner, end of April
a blanket of sand is too much work... edges, and cross them like hopskotch.
Sweating is very dangerous, in the arctic at very sub zero temps.. this has to be avoided at all costs.! (different topic, different thread).
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Including firefighting.