For those of us who love finding and diving on shipwrecks, diving is the means to the end and not the end itself. We are constantly looking for opportunities to explore and combine interests that include history, research, adventure and diving. A few years back, I made the conscious decision to find a way to tie these things together and started Thermocline Diving. I purchased a large boat and a RHIB and set them up for teaching, research and exploration. In conjunction with the Underwater Archaeology Society of British Columbia (UASBC), we started offering the UASBC Underwater Archaeology for Divers program and we started making plans for finding and diving on some shipwrecks!
We did several smaller projects in the last two years, but our goal was to set up an ongoing expedition project and invite divers from around the world to participate. This past October we finally achieved our goal and with the support of Jacque Marcs, Exploration Director of the UASBC, and divers from British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, Alaska, and California, we did 10 days of diving on multiple targets around Vancouver Island.
Our expedition plan was broken into three parts with a focus on targets in three general areas. We did this to try to keep general travel down to a minimum, but our RHIB proved to be very handy to get people from place to place a lot faster than the bigger dive boat. It also provided us the added safety of a chase boat.
We immediately were faced with weather challenges and altered our dive schedule for the first day. We elected to stay in more protected waters and dived the Beaver II in Cowichan Bay. The original Beaver was the first steam powered ship to travel up the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The Beaver originally sailed for the Hudson Bay company and sank in 1888. For these reasons, it is considered historically significant, so the Beaver II was built up from a former navy ammunition carrier in celebration of the 1966 Centennial. The Beaver II was again rebuilt in 2008 to celebrate British Columbias 150th anniversary but then sunk in 2014 while at anchor in Cowichan Bay.
The wreck sits at about 40 meters and because it is located at the mouth of the Cowichan River, visibility can be less than optimal. On this day, just to prove that point, it was not great! However, it was a great opportunity for the entire team to shake themselves out and get ready for some more interesting diving.
The weather continued to be challenging and with discretion being the better part of valor, we chose to stay in protected waters. Jacques had set up a few “plan B” targets for us and we spent a day looking for a sailboat wreck off Cherry Point. We had photos of the wreck and Jacques had overlaid them on a nautical chart, but we were looking for a needle in a haystack. For many of us though, this is what makes exploration exciting: the search for the unknown. It’s also what makes it so rewarding when you do find what you are looking for! We didn’t find the Cherry Point wreck this time, but we have narrowed down our search!
After dodging a bit of wind and bad weather, we started the part of the project that I was particularly interested in. A Handley-Page Hampden light bomber had struck the water Southeast of Sydney Island in 1942. There had been no salvage attempts and Jacques Marcs had found two different sets of coordinates for the wreck from observers during the time of the accident. Two pilots were lost on this flight, and we knew the aircraft tail number. The previous year we had been involved in some photogrammetry of another Handley-Page Hampden bomber that had crashed in the Saanich Inlet but in that case, a recovery had been attempted and all that remained were the engines, propellors, landing gear, and a few other items. This time we hoped to find a more substantial wreck, but we had an entire square kilometer to cover underwater.
With nothing else to go on, covering that much ground underwater can be a challenging endeavor. We were hampered by strong currents that were affected but other water movement and when we dropped our first shot line, despite the large marker buoy, the current pulled the entire line underwater! We tried again, thinking that maybe something had caught the line, and this one disappeared also. Our plan had been to “mow the lawn” as it were, and conduct transects from a known start point underwater using DPV’s and compasses. We had to change our plan in midstream (no pun intended) and start on the upstream part of our search box and then plot where we went in and where we surfaced. This worked okay except one of the teams was pulled around the small island in front of our search box and the plotted line looked like it went over the island!
After this experience we decided to spend more time getting familiar with the very specific water movement and current patterns of the reported wreck positions. The forecast called for some strong winds from the Southeast, so we chose to shuffle our program around a little and head to some areas that were more protected from those winds.
We chose to continue our documentation and survey work on the SS Admiral Knight, which we had discovered two years ago. This wreck is located on the Eastern side of Galliano Island and lies in about 60 m of water. UASBC divers Ewan Anderson and Jason Cook were the first divers on the wreck then, and Ewan wrote a terrific article about the find for InDepth magazine. We dropped the shot line right beside the wreck and sent two teams down to record video and continue the documentation we started a couple years prior.
Not all the divers on the project were certified to dive to the depth of the SS Admiral Knight so we stopped on the way and dove the wreck of the Del Norte which has been documented extensively by the UASBC. As wrecks get older, they continue to change and several of our divers had never dived the Del Norte. This is a very photogenic wreck however our underwater visibility was not great on that day, so everyone has a reason to go back!
We moved on next to do some diving and documentation on the Henry Foss. The Henry Foss is a 100' tugboat originally launched in 1900. She worked in Puget Sound until her loss on February 13, 1959. She sank quickly and with the loss of six crew members. We have the exact location for this wreck, and it has been dived by UASBC members several times, but the visibility and current can make the dive challenging. It is not considered "deep" by technical diving standards, laying in about 115' of water, but the poor visibility can make it seem deeper. This poor visibility makes this wreck a perfect subject for photogrammetry where we can assemble a collection of images to build a model of the wreck that we would otherwise not be able to see.
Visibility on this wreck this time was very good, and the diving was excellent. The downside to a wreck sitting in a lot of current is that once life gets a toehold on the wreck, it grows quickly and can obscure a lot of the actual wreck. This makes photogrammetry difficult as it relies on matching up sharp edges and corners from photos that overlap as much as 75%. This meant that our goal of doing a photogrammetric model of the wreck didn’t happen however we did capture some excellent video and photos!
As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, for many of us who are passionate about diving and exploration, collecting data from a dive means we can contribute to ongoing study and research. Diving without collecting data is more akin to sightseeing and while that is fun also, it isn’t enough to keep us occupied year after year. To this end, Jacques Marcs had given us “deliverables” for the various wrecks and on the Henry Foss, we were looking for a towing winch, binnacle, wheel and searchlight. We did find some wheelhouse fixtures and we may have found the wheel! The wreck is covered with life, and we will be going back.
Finally, the UASBC was preparing to set a plaque on the Handley-Page Hampden bomber found earlier in the Saanich inlet and a few of the members on our team were outstanding videographers and photographers. We had been asked if we could supply some high quality images the press could use in writing about the plaque placement. Our team delivered in spades and in addition to excellent images, Roger Lacasse built an excellent photogrammetry model connecting all the parts and pieces of the wreck site.
We accomplished a lot during our exploration project, and just as important, we also had fun! We contributed to the collection of data and knowledge about our underwater world, and it is rewarding to know our diving was meaningful. Wreck dives are basically snapshots in time and as we collect them and put them together, we stitch together a movie of the various snapshots. There will come a time when all the wrecks we currently dive will be gone and collecting this data helps preserve them for later students of history, anthropology, engineering and even philosophy. We plan to take what we learned from this year’s exploration project and hit the ground running next August. If you wish to join us or learn about underwater archaeology, please don’t hesitate to contact us at guy@thermoclinediving.com and maybe it will be you in these photos next year!
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Written by Guy Shockey
Guy Shockey learned to dive in a cold mountain lake in Alberta 40 years ago. He is a full-time instructor Evaluator for Global Underwater Explorers and regularly travels the world teaching everything from introductory to advanced technical diving including closed circuit rebreather diving. He is particularly active with instructor training. He has an undergraduate and graduate degree in political science and was a military officer in another life. He has several business startups to his credit including companies in the manufacturing, wholesale, and retail sectors. He played competitive rugby for many years and is an active skydiving instructor and coach. He was the editor for an outdoors magazine for 13 years and regularly writes for various diving publications. His passions include exploration, underwater archaeology, and helping grow diving communities.
