Each dive starts with a series of pre-dive checks and skills to confirm that everything and everyone is absolutely ready to go in the cave.
Pre-dive checks in the head pool at Peacock 1
Category: Advanced Diver Training
Every dive of course started with a dive briefing. My happy students were convinced I was just counting up the ways they could mess things up 
Dive briefing time
All smiles before we jump in for some skills and drills in the open water at Orange Grove.
Gemma and Greg kitting up at Orange Grove
After a day of theory and dry drills we headed to Orange Grove for an open water skills dive and the first Cavern Dives to introduce the students to the overhead environment. The head pool was a little green but we eagerly jumped in for a two and a half hour dive practising all the techniques we had discussed yesterday.
Finning techniques, line laying, line following, air sharing exercises, valve drills and all sort of fun preceded our first foray in to the cavern zone in Orange Grove.
Next stop, beyond the Cavern zone and in to the cave at Peacock 1.
The beautiful Orange Grove
As usual we were based at the Dive Outpost. A number of these photographs were taken by one of my students, Chris Sterritt, who takes fantastic images.
The Dive Outpost. Home for the next week or so for my students and for a month and a half for me.
I spent about 10 days diving in the mine. Toward the end of the courses we even had the opportunity to dive some of the mine passages that had not seen any traffic since the mine was working and lay some new line
Långban MIne
If you have an opportunity, it is definitely worth a visit. Get in touch if you fancy it and I can pass on some details of the chaps who organise diving there.
The diving was excellent but, as expected, quite chilly (not the coldest mine I have dived in but not exactly tropical).
One of the mine passages with old rail trolleys still there
Typical of a lot of mine diving the visibility was always very good, the exception being in some areas where we have done some drills and skills!
Not a timely update, but wanted to finish the story - Långban is unique in that it was the only mine in the world where some minerals found. Långbanite was the name given to one of these minerals found only in this mine.
The rare mineral found only in Långban
I did spend some time looking for a piece, but no luck
The mine was predominantly an iron ore mine, but the complex local geology meant that some 300 minerals were mined here, with 30 of those being unique to this mine. A number of different access points have been used to enter and dive the flooded passages, but now just one main entrance is used, with others being used just for surfacing or exiting in an emergency.
Långban Mine - the entrance in to the water
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Back in June I had the opportunity to travel to Sweden to run some CCR courses. The plan was to run a CCR Mine Diver course and then take the same students and progress them through CCR Normoxic and CCR Trimix in the mine diving sites. Despite never having received formal training, mainly through lack of access to suitably qualified Instructors willing to dive in the rather chilly mines, the students were all very experienced diving both CCR and in the mine environment.
The site chosen for the course is quite remote, and so we had one staying in a camper van, one camping, one in a disused building and me in the luxury of a hostel half a mile down the road!
Each morning we would gather around the camper van for breakfast, to be attacked by mosquitoes and for either some theory lessons over the earlier days of the course or dive briefings and into the water once we were into the swing of things.
