diving in canada

This page contains additional material and images for the Prologue of my book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks.

In the Prologue I describe my first experiences of diving in Canada, and how that shaped my fascination with underwater exploration and shipwrecks. I learned to dive in 1977 at the age of 15 and qualified with my first open-water dive the following year. I lived and breathed diving – I pored over the monthly Skin Diver magazine and articles on diving in National Geographic, and read everything I could in the local libraries on diving and shipwrecks. I worked on a farm in the summers to save up enough money to buy diving equipment, including my first wetsuit, bought from Supreme Divers in Toronto, and my regulator, a Poseidon Cyclon 300 that I still use. For my 17th birthday I was given a dive watch that was to be my trusted ‘computer’ for years to come, with a moveable bevel that I set at the beginning of each dive to see the time elapsed. By the time I was in my final year of high school I knew that I wanted a career that combined my twin passions of diving and archaeology, something that seemed rich in possibilities with the shipwreck projects then underway around the world, from treasure wrecks of the Caribbean to ancient wrecks in the Mediterranean and the excavation of the Mary Rose off England.

The area where I lived in Ontario is covered in rivers and lakes, with the Great Lakes like inland seas. My friend Steve Aitken and I dived under ice and in a submerged mine, but it was the dives that we did at Tobermory on Lake Huron that really set the stage for my future. Our first-ever open-water dive was on a wreck – a wooden steamer – and we went on to dive on other wrecks, including a schooner sitting intact on the bottom as large as any seagoing ship. Tobermory lies at a narrow passage between Georgian Bay and the main body of Lake Huron where ships bringing raw materials such as timber and ore would sail down to ports in the United States or deliver them for transhipment through the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic and Europe. The excitement of those first dives has never left me nor a fascination with the maritime history that those wrecks represent, linking them to a wider world that gives the ships and the artefacts their greatest significance.

More than two decades later, after having had some of those experiences that I had dreamed about – directing an ancient wreck excavation in the Mediterranean, making shipwreck investigation part of a doctoral project – I returned to dive again at Tobermory, this time with my brother Alan. As well as diving off Mexico, Hawaii and Cornwall, we made Tobermory a special focus in order to allow Alan to develop his underwater videography projects – something that you can see in the videos linked below. Later we expanded our brief to dive on historic sites submerged in the St Lawrence River and on wrecks from the War of 1812 at Kingston on Lake Ontario, both of which you can read more about below. In 2016 my daughter Molly trained with Diver’s Den in Tobermory, carrying out her first open-water dive on the same wreck that I had first seen more almost forty years before, and in the following year she and Alan and I spent a week diving together on several of our favourite wrecks off Tobermory, something that you can see in Alan’s ‘Caves and Wrecks’ film linked below.

On this page I’ve embedded six videos made by Alan, included a small selection of still images from our diving in Ontario and below that added another gallery linking to blogs that I’ve written on these sites.

VIDEOS

IMAGES (click to enlarge)

BLOGS