By Alec Peirce
Guest Writer, Dive News Network

No one really understands just how big the Ontario area is. Most divers dive a specific area and never realize they are barely grasping the vast cache of shipwrecks and dive sites within the Ontario area. The truth is, a diver could spend more than a year diving the Ontario area and still just scratch the surface of the entire Ontario diving experience.

Ontario itself, a province of Canada, is vast. It is quite literally top hat to the Great Lakes area. Divers often look at the Ontario region as four distinct dive sections; Tobermory, the Kingston-Brockville area, the inland lakes and rivers, and Thunder Bay. Each of these areas offers diving but each is also diverse; there are not many regions where divers can find this much diving all in one place. The sheer amount of diving in the Ontario area is amazing. I began diving in 1958 in the Ontario area and have explored many of the small lakes, rivers, and dams, as well as shipwrecks, in the area. In a lifetime you couldn’t dive them all. Lake Huron and Georgian Bay are deep, clear and cooler, and they were, and still are, major shipping channel.

Lake Michigan has a port in every city, so there is a lot of traffic. And Lake Superior is named so because it is…well…Superior in terms of shipping lanes and access to Canada. All of the waters along Ontario hold diving treasures unmatched elsewhere in the world. Some of the shipwrecks were caused by traffic, but others were caused by weather, notoriously unpredictable on the Great Lakes or sheer navigation problems. In fact, there are so many wrecks that a diver could dive on 25 different shipwrecks in three days and only have seen 20 percent of the shipwrecks available for diving.

Tobermory is an area all its own and is quite popular with divers on both sides of the border. It is located at the northern tip of the Bruce Peninsula and is 300 km northwest of Toronto. The waters at Tobermory and the Bruce Peninsula are a very active dive area and appeals as much for Americans as for Canadians.
There are tons of well-known dive services and shops as well as some great charter services. Home to a World Biosphere Reserve, the area is a place where divers can discover the beating heart of the planet, the massive cliffs of the park while thousand-year-old cedar trees stand guard over the crystal-clear waters of Georgian Bay. The world famous Edmund Fitzgerald rests here as well as hundreds of freighters and old sailing vessels to explore.

The Kingston-Brockville area offers divers a bevy of dives. There are plenty wrecks, walls, drifts, submerged power stations, locks and other terrestrial structures. Some sites divers can access from the shore.  However many of the really exciting dives require a boat. Depths range from 30 – 100 ft. The deep sites and wreck penetrations are recommended for the more experienced, technical divers. Many divers head straight to Rockport known for its deep sites. The Rockport Wall, for instance, dips to 240 ft. and the wreck of the Jodery starts at 130 ft. but divers can expect to bottom out at 240 ft. Shore dives are Rothesay, Conestoga and Prescott docks while popular boat dives include Wolf Islander, Marsh, Keystorm, Kingshorn, America and the Vickery. For the truly adventurous there is the old Mille Roches hydro-electric generating power house. There is also a real concentration of wrecks from Kingston to Cornwall so no matter where you end up in this area there is something to dive.

One doesn’t have to dive into the Great Lakes for diving fun either because there are thousands of inland lakes and quarries. Personally, I enjoy diving the lakes because of the many cars divers will find. There is a little gambling game many Canadians play where they park a car on the ice and take wagers on how long it will take the car to break through the ice. I have dove more than a few of those. There are nearly 100,000 bodies of water from pond size to a lake with a surface area of one million acres. Divers can explore Lac Seul, Lake of the Woods and Red Eagle all located in Ontario. The famous river systems such as the English, Sturgeon also offer a different type of diving with history dating back to the Pleistocene glaciation 10,000 years ago. Divers often find fossils as well as old homesteads in some of the larger waterways. The lower St. Lawrence river offers a lot of diving. There are forts along the waterway so there is a lot of shipping back and forth. There is an enormous amount of history in those waters.

Finally, you can’t talk about Ontario diving without mentioning Thunder Bay. Alpena is home of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The sanctuary was established to protect the water’s shipwrecks and was the first Great Lakes sanctuary that focused solely on a large collection of shipwrecks. It covers 448 square miles of northwest Lake Huron, off the northeast coast of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.  One of the draws to making this area special for divers is Lake Huron’s cold, fresh waters. The combination of cold and fresh has created a great environment for preserving the hundreds of shipwrecks that litter the lake. Divers can literally see many of the wrecks as they were when they sank. The area is really rich in diving. Just off shore there is an island called Isle Royale and it is literally a ship graveyard. Storms come up suddenly and ships would hit the shoals so there are a lot of different types of freighters around the island.

If you are looking for a place offering you so many opportunities to dive you may not hit them all in your lifetime, head for the Ontario area. It is a place as diverse in dive sites as it is in history and, trust me, you will never run out of fun. ■