Klaus Oldendorff

On the weekend 1-3 October 2021 I attended the Porkkala Dive Camp on board of the m/y Orbiit. This was a camp where all scuba diving clubs in the Helsinki capital region were invited. Also my clubs Kupla and Nousu. On previous years the camp had been at the Isosaari island, but the weather had been really bad, very windy and big waves, and had thus prevented diving on nice sites. This year therefore the location was changed to of Porkkala, as there are more dive sites and the archipelago there offers better choice of sites even when wind is hard. The only problem was that the only accommodation that could be arranged at the Porkkala Marina harbour was in the boats, or in cars at the parking lot. Kupla club’s boats are small cabinless open boats. In the Nousu’s Vuoksi boat only 2 persons can sleep and in October it not not very comfortable. Then Hydromania club organized the m/y Orbiit to the camp, and it can pretty comfortable accommodate up to 16 divers. Sukeltajat RY was briniong their boat Maija, which could accommodate 6+4 sleeping places. I decided to go on Orbiit. From Nousu we had 5 divers coming on Vuoksi, and on Orbiit we had 12 divers from many different clubs. No one else from Kupla joined, maybe because the most active divers were on diving trips elsewhere. I did try to get more people from Kupla to join, but that effort failed. I didn’t want to go on Vuoksi either, because Orbiit provided much more comfort for the weekend stay.
Orbiit actually left towards Porkkala already on Friday 1.10. noon, but that was too early for me. They did one dive on the way on Juktensklobben, which I had recently dived twice already. I drove to Porkkala at 7 PM on Friday evening, and had my car full of diving gear. I was preparing for a long dive to the Klaus Oldendorff, so had twin-12 liter tanks of 22/25 trimix, 7 liter Alu deco tanks of 50% and 100% Oxygen and suit gas tank. For the remaining dives I had prepared twin 12L with 28% Nitrox and twin 10L with 32%. I had borrowed one D12 tank from Antti. And of course had my camera etc.
When I got to Orbiit, I drove my car next to the boat on the loading pier, and it was easy to move all the stuff to the boat, and then make my bed downstairs. Then we had dinner at the Marina restaurant. It was a paella buffet. The people on Vuoksi had dived Sandviken. Then lot of socialized with drinks from the bar. There was also the sauna. I got to sleep at 2 AM.
On Saturday morning the breakfast was served at 8 AM and Obiit started sailing to Klaus Oldendorff at 9. From all the divers on Orbiit, it seemed that my best option was joining Riku and Kalle, who were diving on Revo CCR’s and were obviously going to make a long deep dive. I was prepared to do a 90 min dive to see the entire wreck. Riku and Kalle agreed that I could join them. Riku had been on the same Åland trip earlier this summer, but we had not dived together before.
At the site there was no buoy, so Orbiit dropped a heavy shot with thick line. Wind was 8 m/s and wave almost a meter high, so pretty rough. Some divers bailed out totally due to sea sickness.
Me, Riku and Kalle got into water just after 11 AM, and headed straight to the buoy and started descending as soon as possible. Under water there was a strong current and we had no choice but to hold onto the line. The line was at 40 degree angle due to the current, so the descent down to 38 meters was 60 m of line. The shot was on bottom of the front cargo hold. From there we headed towards the rear deck over the broken bridge. We saw the engine room, spare propeller and steering wheel, where Kalle had taken an award winning photo the year before. Then down to see the big rudder and propeller. Then back to the bow, over the broken and fallen front hold. Kalle went a short way to explore the front anchor chain, but it is know that the anchor is really far away. Then back to the place where the ascent line was. We had dived 44 min, and my back gas was running low already at 80 bar, so time to start ascending. I switched to 50% at 21 m and to 100% at 6 m. My back tanks were at 75 bar when switching to 50%. The CCR guys of course kept on using CCR all the way as they always get the most optimal gas at all times. We did all the decos by the computers and had amount the same deco times. We got to the surface at 73 min, so ascent and deco was almost 30 min. Due to the current we had to hold the line.
Later I found out that some divers had lost the line on descent due to current and not holding the line.
I took a lot of pictures, but the visibility was not so great and pictures very blurry. No video.
After the dive there was lunch and Orbiit started sailing to M451 site.