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Highlights of Ice Season 2010

It is with a great pleasure that we introduce our new website!

This year’s winter was long and cold, thus enabling Baikal’s ice to form particularly interesting cracks and under-ice constructions. The transparency has been great as well. All of these factors led to wonderful jeep-safaris.
First ice jeep safari took place in the beginning of March and its participants were members of club “OOPS” and BaikalTek. In this safari we were the first to reach bay Khoboi. To start with ice constructions were preventing us from reaching the bay, but jeeps kept on going forward. Once we laid the path, we were rewarded by extraordinary dives at “Magical Place”, both during this and next safaris.
Olga Kamenska (OOPS, Moscow), Renee Lipman (Netherlands), Dmitri Pradun (Ekaterinburg) took some excellent photographs and the best of them this season were definitely taken at Khoboi. Slava Krasakov (Roskosmos) filmed great video, and some good ones were also filmed by Gennady Misan and Igor Hanaev.
Each safari had banya and it, traditionally, was at Shamanka. Here, near Khuzhir, we create our own ice-hole, near guaranteed great underwater ice constructions. After ice diving banya is a must – it protects health and nourishes positive emotions. It is also absolutely necessary to take a shot of vodka with brown bread, salo (type of bacon) and mustard!
During jeep-safaris dives are often made away from the shores, somewhere near a beautiful ice-crack. We chose a place near the crack that followed eastern part of Olkhon, several kilometers away from Khuzhir – a village where we stayed. Ice thickness was 150 cm and ice looked incredible. Some part of ice peaked down to 6 meters! There was a formation of long underwater tunnels, which were just calling us to go through them. And the combination of bright sun above and darkness of the deep waters below made diving here fantastical.
Another traditional dive-site for jeep-safari is Olkhon Gates. Main reasons to dive here are unbelievable transparency of ice and fields of Baikal sponge. Olkhon has a great number of sunny days, thus making ice-diving conditions even better.
Safari participants had various goals to achieve, and we’re happy to report that all of them were indeed achieved. Some just wanted to relax. Some were interested in photo- and video filming that we already mentioned. Anatoly Verevkin (Nizhni Novogord), Graham Long (Australia), Sergei Matveev (Irkutsk), and Kirill (Moscow) completed training Ice Diver. German scientist and researcher of Baikal’s sponge, Verner Muller, and his team filmed an episode for German TV about Verner’s dives to see Baikal sponge under ice and other beautiful under-ice landscapes. Roskosmos’s filming group filmed another episode about Baikal as well, and filming was done at the same time under water and from space! They were watching our safari from the Space Station. Wolfgang Merkin (Germany) filmed a short film about the mystery of Russian soul and how Russians have fun by diving under the ice, getting some heat in banya and running into cold water afterwards, and underwater fishing.
We stayed at the guest-home of Nikita Bencharov, and evenings spend there were excellent as well. We indulged in local cuisine: lamb buhler (soup), sagudaj, pozy (Buryat ravioli) and omul (Baikal fish) cutlets. Such dinners often lasted till late hours of the night. Some also enjoyed another visit to the banya before dinner.

This was our March.

We also dove in Listvyanka and Bolshie Koty this season. Dives there were made from warm mobile “house” and we held Ice Diver training courses. Japanese divers came to Baikal for 3 days specifically for that training, to have it in real conditions, from highly qualified instructors from one of the best divecenters in Russia.