Lake Weissensee, Austria

By Michael Dalder

I’ve been diving for almost 15 years, but due to family matters it has fallen off my list lately. So a new picture assignment at Lake Weissensee in mid-February 2013 just came right to my diver’s heart: The Underwater Ice hockey Championships.

Underwater Ice hockey is not played on top of the ice like ice hockey is usually played but underneath it. That’s where diving comes into the game because the underwater ice hockey players are in fact apnea divers who want to give their sports an additional sportive kick.

Smoking like 400 years ago…

By Michael Dalder

After eighty-four successive days without catching a fish, the old man Santiago tells his young friend Manolin that he will go “far out” into the ocean. And there, a huge marlin takes his bait but Santiago is physically unable to reel him in. Nevertheless, Santiago refuses to let him go, so this leads to a three-day struggle between the fisherman and the fish.

This famous scene of Ernest Hemingway’s novella “The Old Man and the Sea” was in my mind when I first contacted the Bavarian fisherman Thomas Amort from Lake Koenigssee.

By Michael Dalder

On October 3rd, a day where most of my colleagues were covering the festivities to celebrate German unification, I had the opportunity to be an eyewitness to a Bavarian traditional event. The event was the so-called “Almabtrieb” on the lake Koenigssee, in one of the most beautiful regions of Southern Germany.

At the end of the summer season, farmers move their herds down from the Alps to the valley into winter pastures. The mountain pastures are often in remote areas only accessible by foot – or like the Koenigssee trail – by boat.

By Michael Dalder

After shooting 15 days of swimming, diving and synchronized swimming, the staff of Simons Dive Lodge helped me with the final dive into the Olympic pool. We went down to take our remote controlled robotic underwater camera out of the water.

To get this special perspective from below, we brought 6 Peli Cases containing some 200 kg (440 pounds) of equipment including 150 meters (yards) of power and network cables to the Aquatics Centre to place the underwater camera in the water.

By Michael Dalder and Kai Pfaffenbach

It’s 5am when my alarm clock rings and to be honest, my thoughts are more about coffee than beer.

However, I packed my gear and tried to get ready for the world’s biggest party, where tradition meets madness in Munich: The “Oktoberfest”.