Drysuit diving in Silfra

Sam and I took a challenge and we decided to go for a leisure drysuit dive in Silfra. Silfra is a lake of water that took about a century to arrive from the Langjökull glacier, seeping through underground rocks. The lake is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; nevertheless to say we dove in between the North American and Eurasian plates!

Since water from Silfra comes from a glacier and has been filtered by many porous rocks along the way, it is pure and drinkable and the visibility is perfect. The only thing about it is that, since it melted from a glacier, it's freezing cold. Therefore, we dressed ourselves up like penguins. 

This is me struggling to fit in my drysuit

Red and blue penguins

All geared up with about 20-30kg of weights. I almost died from carrying all these. My legs were wobbly because I couldn't balance so much weight on my back and hips.

Me!

Me again

Sam

Me showing off my weird gloves. Haha. Felt like an alien that day.

Probably the best picture of me and sam (Left: Sam, Right: Me)

Me, towards the end of our dive.

Emerging out of the lake

That narrow water space that we had fun in!

Trekking back with all the gear was no joke!

This experience I had was fun but probably the first and last time I'm going to do drysuit diving in such cold waters. Basically, the weights of all the equipment and the tightness and bulkiness made it extremely difficult and tedious for me. What was worse was that my drysuit leaked, and probably because I was already cold, I didn't realise it till about 2 hours later when i took out my jacket and realised that my insides were all wet (we wear normal winter clothes under the suit). This would explain why towards the end of my dive, I started shivering really bad and continued shivering for a good 20 minutes after I was out of the water. I couldn't even hold a hot cup of chocolate in my hand without dropping it.

2 days later, today, I'm experiencing the worst part of the entire experience... due to a drastic drop of my body temperature caused by the leak of cold water into my clothes and me shivering the whole time, I recently developed cold-induced urticaria or hives. Right now I'm just itching non-stop and it's horrible. Going to visit the doctor tomorrow because I can't take being woken up at 6am from itching anymore. Urgh. ):