21/06/11 Wreck Diving at Fathom Five

Charley ponders the ocean..

Charley and Russ started off in a chaotic mess on the surface nearly abandoning the dive, but managed to get it together.

What an amazing place Ontario is! It’s another beautiful province of Canada, and one that’s jam-packed with adventures. We flew from Bagotville, Quebec and arrived in Toronto on Sunday 19th June, then managing to spend two days exploring the back streets and main centre of this vibrant city.

And boy did we need those two days of relative rest before our next adventures. I’ll give you a little background on Toronto first of all… Firstly wow, is this place busy and fun. We managed to luck our way into the VMA Snoop Dog after party, which was a great place to let our hair down. All in all I’d have to say that Toronto has become one of my new favourite places (along with all of Canada that I’ve seen) and I will definitely be making a return journey.

So, on to our diving adventure! We drove from Toronto to Tobermory in the morning, arriving at Fathom Five National Marine Park at around midday. The weather was unfortunately rather cold, blustery and wet, ahhh perfect conditions for submerging yourself in deep water.

Fathom Five is an amazing place; we couldn’t get our head’s around the fact that it’s fresh water. It’s genuinely stunning, and incredibly has 20 dive sites in its proximity. And they were all really close to where we were. It was a hard decision to choose which one we wanted to dive to be honest, as all the dives are so rich in history, and are predominantly all ship wrecks. On top of all this everything is very accessible, but I have to say that the extremely cold water made for much harder diving than is usually expected at the park.

He survived...

When Russ and I got into the water everything went to hell. My dive belt was falling off, I couldn’t breathe from the cold and it seemed like we’d be in real trouble. We managed to sort ourselves out though, and tried to calm down, whilst we bobbed around in the rough, freezing water.

I was wearing a big hood, three different wetsuits layered on top of each other, and had every hope of being warm or warmish, but once my head was under water I had total and evil brain freeze, the kind you’d expect from sticking your head in a bucket of ice-cream. Not a nice sensation. But it was too late to go back by now, I’d already seen the wreck. We came down through the water on to this amazing steel ship that was perfectly preserved. Fresh water diving is great because it ensure that the wood and metal on a ship wreck don’t rot. Even the ship’s old flag was hanging off the boat, still intact. We managed to make our way into the wreck and stand on the bridge.

This was a wonderful experience all in all, and the cold, harsh conditions really added to the excitement of the dive in the end, but I’d just like to say once more, it was bloody cold. So what I recommend is taking a nicer day and really going for it. Because the variety and number of dives at this park make it truly remarkable.

Until next time,

See you on the road…

Charley xx