Day at the beach (underground)

My vacation started after midsummer. And the first thing one does on a vacation is to go on a beach, of course. Underground.

For three years, I've joined the Swedish cave association's week of researching the Lummelunda cave in Gotland. The cave is a protected natural monument, and is only open for this research one week a year. Around 30-40 cavers gather at the campsite on the sea beach, this time from Sweden, Finland, France, and New Zealand. The cavers explore the cave in various ways, some on the dryer parts of the cave by crawling around, others diving.

On our first day at the cave, the Finnish cavers Ralf Strandell, Jukka Palm and myself wanted to have an easy start in the largest tunnels. We also wanted to try out the photography techniques we had learned in last year's EuroSpeleo course.

We headed to the most photographic tunnels. The watery, muddy, and yes, even sandy subway-size tunnels are a short boat ride and walk away from the entrance of the cave. There are several beaches in the bends of the river that runs through the tunnel and we set out to see what kind of photographs we could make there. It worked out well!





We also saw a nice fossil under the water. Some old and some new life:



Equipment setup:

• Camera (mine is a Nikon SLR)
• Flash controller Yongnuo YN-622 N-TX i-TTL, to control a number of flashes that have suitable triggers. The flash controller is attached to the flash shoe of the camera.
• Flash trigger Yongnuo YN-622N II to attach to the flashes.
• Flashes (mine are Nikons)

I have to say though, one thing to worry about in caving is bad air:

This article has also appeared in TGR. Tämä artikkeli löytyy myös suomeksi Relaasta. See all the caving stories at planetcaver.net, or take a look all the stories at Blogspot and TGR! Photos and text (c) 2019 by Jari Arkko and Jukka Palm. All rights reserved.