Arctic snorkel – North Norway

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Read the behind the scenes story – audio transcribed:

So one of my deep passions is seeing the world and connecting us to parts of nature that are almost on our doorstep but they are just separated from us by a few metres of water. And I love snorkelling and seeing what is, you know, within this blue planet of ours, just a few metres from the shoreline.

And so when we were travelling to Arctic Norway in winter, I was really desperate to take all of my underwater kit with me, so I packed everything up and set off to snorkel in North Norway.

It was early February, and we were staying about four hours north of Tromsø, in an area near a town called Storslett. And I’ve seen so much sea ice around the coast, but it was almost impossible to get into the water where the sea ice was present, and it wasn’t really even near a beach. It was always with rocks, and it was where the high tide would come in, the water would cover the rocks. Then as the tide went out, all of that water would freeze in the day, and then that would gradually pack up and pack up. And I so wanted to be able to snorkel and see that from, underneath and see what that would look like.

But I just couldn’t find an entry point. So, almost at the point of thinking, do I do this because the window was really small in terms of our itinerary, we were driving back to our cabin and there was a white sand beach where, I was thinking, like, maybe I’ll go in because it was high tide. And usually I find the snorkels that I, enjoy are at low tide, because you then get a lot closer to things that are always covered in water. There’s always kind of more interesting things at that point of the sea onwards, so it was just about kind of making do with the situation I was in. 

It was high tide. So I’m thinking, okay, I’m going to try some split shots because I think it’d be really cool to just see, you know, the darkness of the water with the time of year that we’re in, we’re just coming out of that really deep winter in the Arctic, and then those snow covered mountains out on the horizon line. And so, I was just absolutely in my element, messing about in the water, shooting these images and this was one that I really loved with the, the balance and the colours and the tone of the fact, you know, the sun had just set. And we were moving into blue hour, which I think is a really, really beautiful time of day to be shooting.