Day 66 - Geothermal cones

Wolffish!

The blur from the geothermal activity.

Today was something I'd been looking forward too since finding it randomly on the Internet -- visiting the world's only divable geothermal cone (the others are 3000+ meters deep)!  We'd signed up a long time ago with Strytan Divecenter -- run by the guy who found the cone.  Met him at his small dive center that morning (about 20 minutes north of Akureyri in an old herring factory), got our drysuits sorted (though he only had a "small" for Char, not an "extra-small"), and took the 10 minute boat ride out to the first site: Arnarnesstrýtur.

This place has a series of small cones with ~80 degree Celsius water coming out of it.  Immediately after going down a wolffish came to say hi.  Scary looking, but pretty friendly nonetheless.  Then we swam around looking at the various cones and the life that abounded around them.  Unfortunately Char's too-large drysuit was causing her grief, but we managed to complete the dive and see the sights.

Char opted out of the second dive due to the unfortunate drysuit issues, but Erlendur and I headed out after a brief rest to the next site: Strýtan.

Stolen picture since mine
are still on my camera

This site contains just one geothermal cone, but it's 55m tall with the top around 15m below the surface.  We started the dive at the bottom and slowly ascended while circling it all the way to the top.  It was a very impressive site to be sure (though I'll have to post pictures later (I just videoed the entire dive on my GoPro and will have to pick out frames from it later)).  Tons of fish, anemones, and nudibranchs!

The diving actually didn't take that long, so we got back to Akureyri in time for a late lunch at the Hamborgarafabrikkan ("Hamburger Factory" in Icelandic).  Spent the rest of the day wandering and relaxing at the nice Cafe Paris cafe.