Diving at the Whaling Shipwrecks (SS Charcot, Southern Foam and Sukha) at Conception Harbour NL
Photo. The wreck of the SS Charcot. The ship wreck lies in ruin with half the boat above the surface
After completing our NAUI open water certification last summer and diving with the Scouts in Barbados at Easter, Nicolas and I wanted to have another diving adventure during our visit to Newfoundland. We were able to do a couple of fun dives on the Avalon Peninsula, renting tanks and BCD's from Ocean Quest Adventures in St. John's. We brought along our 7 mm wetsuits that we last used in early May when we did a shoreline cleanup dive in Waterton Lake. The Atlantic just off the shore is cold; every bit as cold as snowmelt-fed, alpine lakes in the Rockies in springtime! Most people use drysuits but unfortunately we are not drysuit certified, and it was too much of a rush to train for that in the short span of time we had between May and our trip at the end of June. We were not able to hire a guide (although I tried as early as May, reaching out to Ocean Quest). So we decided to still go ahead but were conscious to not push beyond the limits of our training and experience and researched very simple, safe dives that we discussed with Ocean Quest staff when we picked up our equipment. We were lucky to meet some other divers while we were at the whaling wrecks, probably a testament to the popularity of the site: a super nice couple, Sean and Elizabeth. We dove with them during our second dive of the day right after at Harbour Main.
I was able to find quite a bit of information online about the Whaling Shipwrecks dive at Conception Harbour... but nothing that really showed what the boats looked like underwater, so thought I would share some description / photos and video clips. The biggest diving attraction that you generally will come across near St. John's are the WW2 wrecks off Bell Island, but those dives require both drysuit and higher level training to go deeper than our basic, open water diving certification. We found that there is still a lot of cool diving closer to St. John's and a small but thriving diving community. The whaling shipwrecks are exciting, with half of the massive SS Charcot protruding out of the water and different than the wrecks we saw in Barbados in that they are so large and covered with so much kelp that we almost couldn't tell that these were ships at all! Overall we found the dive site very interesting. The boats are each about 35 m in length, but very shallow wrecks with most of the Shuka only a metre below the surface. The Southern Foam was slightly deeper, but by my gauge we never went deeper than 7 metres during the dive. It would be a suitable site to go for a snorkel. We were in the water about 30 minutes and still had about 1,000 psi on our tanks but decided to save some energy for Harbour Main, which we did right after. One of the highlights of the dive was seeing a school of capelin swim by the SS Southern Foam, which was a thrill. We did this dive on July 4th, missing out on the Canada - Morocco round of 16 knockout game
Photo. Visibility was ok, the bottom is quite silty
Photo: Colourful kelp and seaweed
Photo: Nicolas found a scallop
Photo: A flounder
From https://shipwrecksnl.ca/wreck/ss-charcot/: The SS Charcot was a steel whaling ship built in Tønsberg, Norway in 1923 for the A/S Hvalen whaling company. In 1943, it was sold to the Polar Whaling Company (owned by Christian Salvesen) and was based at the Hawke Harbour whaling station in southern Labrador. In 1956, Charcot was sold to the Hawke Harbour Whaling Company (owned by Johan Borgen) and it remained catching whales in southern Labrador. The Hawke Harbour whaling station burned down in 1959 and Charcot ended up in Conception Harbour, where it was berthed during the 1960s. Between 1968 and 1970, Charcot broke its moorings and ran aground on the beach in Conception Harbour, where it remains today.
Photo. Some trees visible growing out of the deck
Photo. Colourful, yellow kelp and algae obscure the surface of the submerged wrecks.
Photo: a school of capelin swam by as we viewed the SS Shuka
Photo. Wreck of the Southern Foam
Photo. We had fun seeing flounders
A drone image shared to me on the NL Scuba FB page
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