Welcome to the Scuba Diving in Canada and the PADI System Scuba Jedi. My name is Darrell O’Donnell. I’m an Assistant Instructor with PADI and I’ve been a certified diver for 10 glorious years.

I live up here in the Great White North of Canada and I know a lot of warm water divers must think, “How does someone who lives 820km (510 miles) from the nearest coast and whose lakes are frozen for 6 months of the year get out diving?” Well have any of you out there ever considered Ice Diving? It’s a blast and something that very few people will ever try. A warm dive for me is somewhere in the 45-50F surface temperature. I dive in a lot of lakes with visibility that most of you ocean junkies would never even consider good conditions. Most days, when the visibility is 25 feet, it was a great dive.

I would like to bring some different views of diving for the people who think that the only place to dive is in the oceans and/or tropical destinations. Not everyone can afford to take a tropical vacation every month or two so if we want to keep active in diving, we have to take advantage of the lakes and waterways close to home.

If you are into cold water diving, the West Coast of Canada, around Vancouver Island has some of the best diving in the world. Its home to the shy “Six-Gill” shark, giant Wolf Eels, and the Artificial Reef Society of British Colombia has started a wonderful artificial reef program. Since 1991 they have sunk seven old Canadian Navy vessels, (175 to 444 feet long), a Boeing 737 airplane, and they are currently waiting on a new destroyer, (HMCS Annapolis – 377ft) to get approval, and to be finished cleaning.

When you think of diving here in Alberta, no one in their right mind would think of wreck diving.

Well, has anyone ever heard of the Habakkuk?
In 1943, the British and Canadian governments coordinated to make a scale version of an Aircraft Carrier made of a substance called Pykrete. According to The Sea Hunters, (http://www.shipwreckcentral.com/index.php) it’s the only land locked Aircraft Carrier wreck in the world.
Here is a link for any of you that may want a bit more info on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk.

Stay tuned for further articles.

Darrell

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