Dive Review of Sigurdur Haraldsson/N/A in
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Sigurdur Haraldsson/N/A: "Cold Water Diving in the Land of Fire and Ice", Oct, 2024, by Ryan M Neely, MN, US ( Reviewer 4 reports with 2 Helpful votes). Report 13172.
Photos Submitted with this Report Click on an image to see an enlarged version and captions
Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Accommodations	N/A	Food	N/A
Service and Attitude		Environmental Sensitivity
Dive Operation		Shore Diving
Snorkeling	N/A
Overall Rating
Value for $$
Beginners
Advanced
Comments	We had heard a lot about diving Silfra--a traditional bucket-list destination for divers--which saw us researching a trip to Iceland, but we wanted to do more diving than simply exploring Silfra with a guide. There is a lot we did topside (we were in Iceland for three weeks), but we put in six out of twelve scheduled dives while we were there, and each individual dive was amazing. Siggi from IceDive.is was an excellent guide. IceDive.is is a SDI/TDI organization, so technical diving is an option there. Since we were only doing recreational dives and we were trying to keep things cheap in an already expensive vacation, we dived air. (Though, I think Nitrox or Trimix could have been available if those are the dives you're interested in.) Siggi picked us up at the airport in his van and drove us to each dive site. We spent the drive between dives for lunch and our surface interval. In the ocean dives, we saw a ton of jellyfish and starfish and soft spongey corals and a cousin to the scorpionfish and a curious seal. There was kelp and rocks and all manner of places for things to hide. Siggi even found us a nudibranch. I'd never seen one in the wild. They're tiny. We also dived in several freshwater lakes. Kleifarvatn, where there's some kind of hot springs activity, and Silfra (of course) and Davidjá (which is still a crater, but at the bottom of a lake). Lots of massive freshwater trout here. There's a lot of good here. Great diving. Great guide. There isn't a lot of bad. We had good weather (though going to Iceland in October means we could have had every day canceled due to weather, so we were lucky there). It would have been nice to have been a bit more familiar with the area so we could have tailored our dives to our likes (we like to look for small critters, and we often spend hours around a single coral head rather than trucking through a mile-long loop to see all of the things). We left the hotel in our undergarments and spent the day in them rather than changing once we reached the dive site. I did not enjoy hauling our dive gear all over the country. We could have rented, but with latex allergies and sizing issues, you never know what you're going to get. So we brought everything. That would have been fine, because we were scheduled for three days of diving in the north with Erlandur from Strytan Dive Center, but all three of those days were canceled due to unforeseen conflicts. Definitely bring a save-a-dive kit that includes stuff for your drysuits. I'm not convinced that traveling with them wasn't the reason we both ended up wet on every dive. I think we may have damaged the zippers (despite traveling with them unzipped). Silfra was at the bottom of my list for this trip before we left. I just didn't think it was going to be that cool. I was wrong. It was really amazing. We were the first ones in the water that morning, so we had the entire place to ourselves. That's one reason I'm super happy we chose to dive with Siggi instead of one of the other outfits. I contacted all of the other dive operators who dive in the south (Arctic Adventures, Dive.is, and Magma Dive) and was told that from the end of September through May none of them dive anywhere other than Silfra due to potentially hazardous conditions in the ocean. When we arrived at Silfra and I saw the conveyor belt cattle call system each of these operators had set up for diving Silfra, I was doubly pleased we went with a private tour. It was just three of us and we didn't have to wait in line with a group of people rotating in and around us. Anyway, we only managed to get in six dives, but we're already making plans to go back to make up the diving we missed in the north. We were both really looking forward to diving there. Topside, there's a lot to do. We booked a self-driving tour of the Ring Road through Nordic Visitor. They handled booking our rental car and all of our accommodations. They even put together a packet of all the things we might want to stop and look at on our daily drive from one accommodation to the next. Let me tell you, you can throw a rock in this country and hit a waterfall. They're everywhere. Our schedule prevents us from taking vacations from May through September, so we're always visiting places during their off-season. We arrived in Iceland at the end of their peak season, and boy-howdy, there were still a ton of people within a day's drive from Reykjavik. Mostly, I think this is because Icelandair sells packages for other destinations that make it appealing to fly through them. (For example: Fly from the US to Ireland with Icelandair and spend an extra two nights seeing the sights in Iceland. We'll book a hotel and rental car for you and everything.) That being said, even with good weather of an October in Iceland, we still ran into a lot of areas that had been closed for the season. Even the popular tourist destination had closed off certain areas for the winter that would have otherwise been accessible during the summer. Mostly this is due to poor walking or hiking conditions and for the safety of tourists. (If you're going to visit in the shoulder seasons or during the off season, bring your own crampons and a pair of trekking poles, especially if you're going to visit any of the waterfalls. People were sliding all over the ice created by waterfall mist and sub-freezing temperatures.) It wasn't until we made it to the northeastern regions that I finally felt like most of the tourists had vanished and we were finally visiting the country on our own. That isn't quite true. There were still tourists, but the sheer number of them had diminished by eighty percent. Having toured the perimeter of the entire country, I don't have much to say about the interior (it was inaccessible to us while we were there). That said, our style of travel has us exploring and hiking areas that go beyond the tourist zone. What this means is that, for us, we probably could have spent our entire three weeks on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, hiking the trails around the glacier and seeing the magnificent rock formations. We did have the opportunity to visit an ice cave that had formed inside of a glacier, a lava cave that had formed eight thousand years ago during some eruption or another, and a man-made cave in a glacier that was created for sciency reasons (mostly). Each of them were interesting in their own right. Beyond that, there was a lot of driving from site to site, from tourist attraction to tourist attraction, getting out of the car, spending twenty minutes or so looking at the thing and taking pictures, and then getting back in the car and carrying on. We definitely could have used another month just to see more of the things a less of a breakneck speed (and we booked the "Leisurely" tour).
Websites	Sigurdur Haraldsson
Reporter and Travel
Dive Experience	101-250 dives
Where else diving	Vancouver Island, Northern Minnesota, Bonaire, Dominica, Iceland
Closest Airport	Keflavík International Airport	Getting There	We had a direct flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Keflavík. We had no troubles getting there.
Dive Conditions
Weather	sunny, cloudy	Seas	calm, surge
Water Temp	33-49°F / 1-9°C	Wetsuit Thickness
Water Visibility	50-300 Ft/ 15-91 M
Dive Policy
Dive own profile	?
Enforced diving restrictions	There weren't really any restrictions enforced. We were unfamiliar with the area, so we proceeded with Siggi as our guide and trusted him to lead us safely in and out from shore.
Liveaboard?	no	Nitrox Available?	N/A
What I Saw
Sharks	None	Mantas	None
Dolphins	None	Whale Sharks	None
Turtles	None	Whales	None
Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):
Corals		Tropical Fish
Small Critters		Large Fish	N/A
Large Pelagics	N/A
Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):
Subject Matter		Boat Facilities	N/A
Overall rating for UWP's		Shore Facilities	N/A
UW Photo Comments	We worked out of our hotel room for this. Our room was tiny and almost impossible to rinse gear at the end of the day. I'd opt for a larger suite-style room the next time we go just to have the space we need to rinse and clean gear. Siggi did offer to take our drysuits to his shop and rinse and dry them overnight for us, which was great.

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Dive Review of Sigurdur Haraldsson/N/A in General Travel/Other Locations/Iceland

Sigurdur Haraldsson/N/A: "Cold Water Diving in the Land of Fire and Ice", Oct, 2024,

Photos Submitted with this Report

Ratings and Overall Comments 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Overall Rating

Reporter and Travel

Dive Conditions

Dive Policy

What I Saw

Ratings 1(worst) - 5 (best):

Underwater Photography 1 (worst) - 5 (best):

Dive Review of Sigurdur Haraldsson/N/A in
General Travel/Other Locations/Iceland