Ormestad 27/3 2021. Mud and clear waters.

Hi and ho!

This weekend, me and my buddies decided to go dive in the Gullmar fjord, as we reasoned that the ice cover that had been there due to the cold-snap in January to February had to be gone by now. Said and done, we decided that the site of the day was to be Ormestad, the best wall diving spot in the area. Due to rain and melting ground frost, ice and snow, the ground in the area was very soft and muddy (so muddy that we in fact got stuck for a while when we were leaving the site later at night). So, we parked our car, carried our dive gear to the wood pier in the area and geared up for the dive.

Bobtail squid resting on the bottom

Dive 1:

Depth 26 m, Time: 43 min, Temp: 5 °C

We waded out into the water and started swimming towards the cliff on the left side of the bay, as to reach the main attraction of Ormestad, the vertical wall that extends from the surface and down to 90m depth. When we reached the wall we started to descend, following the wall down to an appropriate depth and outwards with the wall to our left. As we descended, we realized that the surface had rather bad visibility, which cleared up after about 5 m, going from 2 m visibility to about 7-10m. On the wall, it was full of sessile organisms like tube worms, sea anemones and sea squirts of different kind. After a little while, it became time to turn around as I hit turn pressure in my tanks. So that we did. At 43 minutes, we surfaced and started to swim back to the wood pier from where we started. During this dive I was testing out the new camera housing trigger (in reality a old one from my previous camera house, the one on my current camera housing broke last week), which worked pretty well, just took a bit more force to take photos.

After we got up, we had a bit of a surface intervall before getting ready for the next dives.

Dive 2:

Tall sea pen, one among many

Depth 28 m, Time 37 min, Temp: 5 °C

After having a surface intervall, we got ready to get into the water, I almost didn't do the dive, as my stomach was feeling like it was acting up a little bit. But soon it calmed down, and I got ready to dive in a jiffy. This dive, we went towards the right side of Ormestad instead, where there is a muddy slope instead of a vertical wall. We followed the slope downwards, looking at (and in my case, photographing) the critters that showed up here. At about 24 m depth, we hit a rather nice "forest" of Tall sea pen, which I stayed around to try and photograph a little bit. After we left the forest, we encountered a bobtail squid resting on the sea floor, which I of course had to photograph as well. Around this time the no deco limit time was starting to run low, so we had to start swimming upwards again. We surfaced at 37 minutes and swam back to shore.

All in all, it was a nice dive day, even if we did get stuck in the mud with the car as we were leaving. 

So until next time! Keep on swimming! 

Rugose squat lobster hiding in crevice