Crossing the causeway from the mainland part of Nova Scotia to the island of Cape Breton the scenery takes on a dramatic change. From Halifax it has been gently rolling swampy forest and tundra with plucked outcrops of rock. Cape Breton is more mountainous. Not big mountains, but big enough to look like mountains from sea level. In between are valleys with inlets and sea water lakes. The sort of coastline that instantly says "come and dive me".
My host, Terry Dwyer of Atlantic Dive Tours, drives the truck further north and fills in some background. Bras d'Or Lakes are a complex of enormous salt water lakes connected to the sea through a narrow channel. In the shallows are shellfish and salmon farms. Some of the lakes go very deep and had been partly explored by Cousteau.
We stop at a government liquor store and stock up with drink. It's the only way to buy alcohol in Canada and there are no bars where we are heading at the north end of Cape Breton. As with just about everything else, bottled beer is ridiculously cheap.
At St Andrew's harbour we take a short ferry across a fast flowing channel. I ask how deep it is (20 metres) and remark that it looks like a good spot for a drift dive if planned to avoid the ferry. Terry says that to his knowledge no one has ever dived there.
Nova Scotia is a province with about half the land area of England, more coastline, 5,000 wrecks, less than 1.5 percent of the population and whilst there are a fair measure of tourists on the road there are no divers in sight. Imagine having the English Channel to yourself on a prime August weekend. Or maybe a much enlarged version of the Sound of Mull as the scenery is more like Scotland.
The road follows the coastline. St Paul Island can just be made out in the distance as we swing round the last few twists and turns before we arrive in Dingwall. I had heard lots about St Paul Island from BSAC expeditions and others over the last several years. Terry had provided the local management for all of these so I have high expectations for the diving.
Nicknamed "The Graveyard of the Gulf" long before it became a dive destination, St Paul Island has been the site of many shipwrecks as it is the last obstacle between the Atlantic and the Gulf of St Lawrence, the St Lawrence Seaway and shipping routes into the industrial heart of Canada and northern states of the USA.
Next morning the wind has picked up and is coming in hard from the east. I spend the day wandering round the area and getting to meet a few people, including fishermen Paul and Scott whose boats we would be diving from.
Late in the afternoon the wind moves further south-east and the inshore water is now sheltered. It is too late to dive, so we take Terry's Zodiac RIB for a run along the coast. It was originally built as a demonstrator for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police before Terry acquired it, so has all the electronics imaginable including radar.
That evening I discover that the dive centre doubles as the local social spot when everyone drops by to have a chat and a beer. Good job we stocked up on the way north.
Finally the wind drops and backs to the north-west with a long enough window for us to visit St Paul Island for a day. We set off early in the morning in a nicely seaworthy lobster boat skippered by Paul. It would have been a bit of a long way to travel in an open RIB, especially considering the fickle weather.
Once out of the shelter of Money Point it is a rough crossing. I hide in the wheel house out of the spray. Approaching St Paul Island it becomes obvious that the west side of the island and the best of the wrecks will be too exposed. Paul steers along the sheltered east side to Atlantic Cove.
Here we dive on the wreck of the Aurora, a small steamship that hit the rocks just along from the decaying old buildings that overlook the cove. My buddy is Gabe, a mountie from Halifax and ex member of the police diving team.
With the wreck lying well broken amongst rocky gullies Paul drops anchor on transits and depth. The anchor isn't hooked onto the wreck, but a simple cross pattern search leads us back under the anchor and Paul's boat to the main body of the wreck almost directly below.
Having found wreckage I head for the stern, the wreck becoming more intact as we get further aft, though none of it really qualifies for the description "intact".
The stern hangs across a gully. It has an unusual tapered structure with the remains of the rudder on a tiller post. Tucked below is a long and skinny 3 bladed iron propeller. From some angles it looks like it may have been a more typical 4 bladed propeller bent out of shape, but up close there is no doubt it is a genuine 3 blades set 120 degrees apart.
The Aurora is thought to have been lost in the 1880s and may well have been a decade or two old at the time, originally built back in the days when they were still experimenting with steam ships trying to get the shape right.
The hull is broken down below deck level with kelp growing on the ribs and edges. Where it is shaded in the gully below there is enough of a funnelling effect on the sea to feed a few clumps of plumose anemones.
Further forward there is little sign of the engine, a shame as it would have been a fairly primitive example, maybe just a single cylinder or early two cylinder compound engine. The remains of a pair of small boilers are broken open, rivets popped from their holes. Just a few tubes are left inside and the more robust surround of the fire box door.
Forward from the boilers the wreckage becomes just a widely scattered field of steel splinters. Broken by storms, but also the victim of winter ice. The sea only freezes a few inches deep, but as the ice floes shift against the island sheets of ice are tipped on end and packed together to scour as much as 6 or 7 metres deep.
The result is smoothly scoured rocks for the first few metres below the surface with just a few sprigs of kelp from a single season of growth. There is then a band of kelp from 7 metres down, fizzling out between 15 and 25 metres, occupying the depth below the ice scour while still with enough light.
Gabe takes the tender inshore, but it is too rough to land. There are no proper jetties or sheltered landings, just a few beaches and rocks that can be accessed in benign conditions. We rest at anchor and have a barbecue lunch.
The buildings used to be home to a ship to shore radio station, a marine rescue team and over the summer by fishermen. More recently they have been used to accommodate diving expeditions.
Owned by the Canadian government, they are falling into disrepair. Every winter another building just gets blown away by a storm. A group of volunteers raised funds, got sponsorship from a timber company and were prepared to renovate the key buildings. Unfortunately the bureaucrats refused permission, it was just easier to say no and watch historic buildings fall down than it was to sort out the paperwork to allow civilians to work on government property.
The wind is picking up a bit, but we are still on the sheltered side of the island. Our next dive is at Norwegian point, just a short distance north and on the wreck of the Norwegian.
When the island was inhabited by lighthouse keepers and summer only fishermen, points, rocks, and inlets seem to have been routinely named after ships that had come to their grief. The Aurora was close to Aurora rocks. A look at the map gives a simple clue as to where to search for previously un-located wrecks. This is how one of the BSAC expeditions managed to find the wreck of the Norwegian.
In 1863 the steamship Norwegian ran straight in at 13 knots, managing to push some distance up the shelving rock before toppling to port. All but two of the 550 passengers and crew climbed ashore over the bow.
Paul's anchor isn't on the wreck so I run a search. It takes me half the dive to find the wreck. Surprise, surprise, it is right under the boat again in just short of 20 metres.
I later quiz Paul about this. With little current to worry about, the standard practice here is to anchor into whatever wind or current there is so the boat is directly over the wreck. With typically good visibility, negligible current and diver's who know the system it makes a lot of sense. Used to UK diving, I had biased my search ahead from the anchor assuming it had dragged.
Anyway, having looped round and back under the boat I follow a trail of debris up a gully to the rudder and stern with a 4 bladed iron propeller. The wreck has collapsed flat on its port side, lying up the slope and broken where rocks thrust up between sections.
Like the Aurora it is an interesting dive, but I surface knowing that I am missing out on the best St Paul Island has to offer.
Another day is lost to strong winds and Terry arranges some alternative diving. We had been planning to drive to Louisburg at some point and now seems like the best opportunity.
Occupying a strategic position guarding the entrance to the Gulf of St Lawrence, Cape Breton has changed hands between Britain and France several times as various colonial wars were fought. Each administration had their own town, and as the name implies, Louisburg was the centre of French colonial government. In the harbour are a number of historic wrecks, subject of archaeological survey and treasure excavation.
The fishing boat heads out of the harbour past the old French fortress. Built to point guns over the harbour entrance it was stormed twice by British land attacks, being handed back to the French by some treaty in between. I would have thought they should have learned the first time.
Gooseberry Cove and the wreck of the Montara are a few miles north along a beautiful stretch of coastline. The Montara was heading for Louisburg to pick up a cargo of coal when she struck the rocks and broke up on 13 August 1920. It wasn't the first time the Montara had sunk, having originally been built in 1880 and wrecked in Oregon before being raised and rebuilt for Atlantic use.
It is only 15 metres deep with much of the wreck is shallower so I have a good 45 minutes no-stop dive. At the stern the iron propeller and rudder are still in place, a tiller style steering rather than a more modern quadrant showing the age of the ship. Further forward the boilers have rolled and one tipped on end out of the wreck. The small steam engine is spread in bits from the propeller shaft to forward of the boilers, and the forward part of the wreck is completely dispersed.
Having been travelling in ballast to collect a cargo of coal, the Montara would have not been a major target for salvage, though I suspect that blasting to remove the engine bearings would have been responsible for the state of the engine and boilers.
On the way back to Louisburg we dive the wreck of the Evelyn, a 2,379 ton steamship which struck the rocks in the harbour entrance on 9 January 1913. As usual, it is well broken, but the distribution of debris is certainly unusual.
The crankshaft lies well to one side of the propeller shaft. One boiler lies almost on top of the spare propeller at the stern, and the other boiler is a good 50 metres away in the shallows, again off the stern.
On the drive back to Dingwall we pass Sydney harbour, another large natural harbour and the main industrial harbour of Cape Breton, servicing the coal mines and steel works. It was also a major convoy marshalling area in the Second World War.
Terry remarks that he would like to survey it some time as it has never been properly surveyed for wrecks and is pretty much un-dived. Yet surveying Sydney harbour will have to wait as his project for next summer is a treasure hunt off the north of Cape Breton for old wooden wrecks carrying bullion.
Many of the road signs mark the route as the "Cabot Trail", after the explorer John Cabot who first landed at Cape Breton in 1497, though it was actually named Cape Breton a few years later by the French explorer Jaques Cartier.
The wind at Dingwall is still pushing directly on shore and there is again no possibility of leaving the harbour. To get out and about we take a drive up to Meat Cove, the most northerly settlement on Cape Breton at the end of a dirt track road.
There are two stories about how it got the name. The first is that sailing ships used to put in here to hunt for fresh meat. The second is that a fir and skin gathering expedition butchered an enormous number of moose here, skinned them and left the carcasses to rot on the beach.
Back in Dingwall, entertainment for the afternoon is an archaeological and treasure hunting team who had been working on the 1761 wreck of the Auguste just outside the harbour. It being too rough to work outside, they are raising some cannon which had been stashed beneath one of the fishing piers.
Another day and another onshore wind in the morning. Nevertheless, by the afternoon the wind has moved far enough south to give us some shelter and we head off in the Zodiac for a couple of local dives on the way to Money Point.
On the way out Terry spots a sunfish. I hang my camera over the side and get a few shots in firing blind.
Just a few hundred metres back from Money Point is the Karita, marked by debris on the shore line and commercially scrapped soon after it hit the rocks in 1976. Paul had commented that as a teenager he had first got drunk on bottles he and friends had acquired while scrambling over the new wreck.
There is not much left, but I have an enjoyable 90 minutes pottering about in just a few metres turning over bits of wreckage and picking out the odd sparkly piece of non ferrous metal.
There is a museum of local shipwrecks attached to the dive centre and Terry welcomes interesting trinkets. Salvage law in Canada is pretty much the same as in the UK with a receiver of wreck, though you must not disturb anything of historical interest.
Halfway back to Dingwall we dive the wreck of the Loveland, another ship that came straight into the rocks in the latter half of the 20th century. This time a cargo of 1,000 tons of timber was put to good use building local houses.
Again it is in only a few metres of water, but the dive is a not up to much as the small cove where it rests has been filled with dead kelp blown in by the storms. I can just about feel my way along bits of wreckage by pushing my arms all the way down in the dense mass of slimy decomposing weed. The only bit I found sticking up was a broken propeller.
Maybe I would have appreciated it more in better conditions, because local divers who had previously dived both the Loveland and the Karita considered the Loveland a better dive.
A couple of days later and it is my last day. We hadn't been able to get out to St Paul Island again and we head out for another afternoon of local dives.
Rather than dive the Karita again I opt to swim offshore from the wreck towards Money Point and see what happens in deeper water. I am rewarded by an absolutely sparkling 5 metre rock wall between 25 and 30 metres.
The dominant covering is bright orange soft corals and sponges, with small anemones between and larger clumps of plumose anemones on the exposed corners.
A similar experiment off the site of the Loveland is less successful. Away from the current at Money Point the marine life just is not as profuse. Perhaps the most interesting part are the valleys between rocks which are now urchin graveyards, where the shell of thousands of dead sea urchins have accumulated over the years to produce piles several layers deep. Their relatives don't seem to mind, still grazing their way across the rocks above.
Save for a drive back to Halifax and the airport, that was it. I had some quite nice dives. Even when it was windy the sun was out most of the time. My disappointment and not getting more time on the wrecks of St Paul Island was in many ways compensated by a relaxing time, beautiful scenery, cheap beer, regular barbecues and many new friends.