NORWAYADVENTURE
Norwegian
blues ( and greens )
A liveaboard trip to Norway has become a rite of passage for the UK ’ s technical divers . We asked Alex ‘ Woz ’ Warzynski for an account of his summer voyage on MV Clasina
Gun mount on the Welheim
This trip had an interesting start . With Heathrow in complete chaos , the airline cancelled our flights , offering a replacement that would have left us two days too late to meet the boat . We instead plumped to leave a day early from Gatwick , changing at Oslo . This worked pretty well , especially as Bob Anderson ( owner-skipper of the Clasina liveaboard ) kindly let us board a day early , as he had an unused cabin from the previous week ’ s
42 charter . The purchase of a couple of Apple AirTags added an entertaining level of paranoia to the journey , with phones pinging to inform us that our bags were miles away . They did , however , arrive with us and the whole process was pretty painless . Helpfully , the taxi transfer from the airport that we pre-booked had a fixed , vaguely reasonable price instead of an eye-watering meter charge from the row of electric taxis lined up in Bergen .
German WWII bunker
PHOTO : JEN SMITH
A word about Norway . It ’ s about a decade or three ahead of the UK in terms of greenness , cleanliness and recycling . The place is nipping clean ( I saw three items of litter in all the time I was there ), electric cars are the norm , and the whole place has a quiet air of confidence and charm that is pretty attractive . Even on Saturday night , the grassy squares had people quietly enjoying the sun rather than the more usual UK fayre of drunkards yelling at each other .
Clasina act
Sunday morning and the Clasina left Bergen . We opted to steam five hours north , getting some miles under our belt before getting to the wreck of the Frankenwald , an excellent shake-down dive for the week , lying upright in around 50m . A few weeks before this trip , my dive buddy Jen had done a Malin Head trip on the Clasina , and taken the opportunity to leave a couple of dive scooters on board , for us to use on this trip . With the size of some