Canada's watery museums

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Floating past the deck of a sunken vessel, searching for historic artifacts, exploring bunks where crew and passengers once slept, imagining why their ships went down and what it was like to be thrown into the chilly Canadian waters…

Such is the appeal of recreational shipwreck diving, a fast-growing industry that is drawing divers, their families, and millions of dollars into communities like Brockville, Kingston and Tobermory, Ontario; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Underwater explorers from Toronto, Vancouver, the United States, Europe and Australia are flocking to the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River and Canada's east and west coasts for a first-hand look at the thousands of wrecks history has donated to Canadian waters over hundreds of years.

With the amount of money that divers spend on accommodation, food and diving supplies it's no wonder the operators of dive shops, scuba charter services, hotels and restaurants are smiling. Around Vancouver Island and near Halifax Harbour, some in the tourism business say dive-related tourism activities quadrupled between 1990 and 2000.

For the most part, divers are drawn to Canadian waters between April and November by the vast number of shipwrecks: in Kingston alone, there are 15 moored dive sites near the city's waterfront. But they also come for the clarity of Canada's water, which makes it easy to find and examine intact decks, boilers, wooden and steel hulls, masts, cooking utensils, cannon balls and the spilled cargoes that sometimes dragged these once-proud vessels to their watery graves.

In the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, the water's clearness is due in large measure to zebra mussels, which arrived in the 1980s in the ballast water of foreign ships. The thumbnail-sized mollusks have filtered particles and contaminants from the water, helping improve visibility from an arm's length to as much as 30 metres in some areas.

This cleansing has transformed Canada's mecca of divable shipwrecks into a swim through our colourful sea-going past. Among the underwater treasures divers can access are the Comet, a steam-powered side wheeler that sank in Lake Ontario near Kingston in 1861; the Empress of Ireland, which went down in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1914, claiming more than 1,000 lives; and the Letitia, a 142-metre British hospital ship that sank in Halifax Harbour in 1917.

But not all sunken vessels are the victims of stormy weather, shallow water hazards, collisions and poor navigators: in recent times, decommissioned destroyers, car ferries and fishing vessels have been deliberately scuttled in locations easily accessible to divers—in the Great Lakes, and off the coasts of British Columbia and Nova Scotia—as a way of providing fresh investigative possibilities for wreck-hungry divers.