Postcards from Alberta

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. If you are casually browsing on the internet for scuba diving sites near St. John's, generally the first hits will come across are the WW2 wrecks off Bell Island. Unfortunately, those dives require both drysuit and higher level technical dive 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 World Cup Soccer match between Canada and 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

The pdf guide map above is a great diving guide and can be downloaded from : Conception-Hbr-SPSNL-divers-guide-2014.pdf

We met a couple diving here and we tagged along to Harbour Main with them after. Thanks Sean and Elizabeth.

Other references:

1. SS Charcot | hiddennewfoundland https://www.hiddennewfoundland.ca/ss-charcot

2. Charcot SS - Shipwreck Preservation Society of Newfoundland & Labrador (SPSNL) or https://shipwrecksnl.ca/wreck/ss-charcot/

3. https://www.ikelite.com/blogs/features/canadian-splash-destination-newfoundland?srsltid=AfmBOorK06Mqz28s9TVDwjo3AHQ_Q0NsXp5ch5zmXHCL8F4MtNZiMqJ4

4. Survey of Whaling Shipwrecks in Conception Harbour, NL Ken W. Keeping1,2 and Neil M. Burgess1 1 Shipwreck Preservation Society of Newfoundland & Labrador 2 Maritime Survey Services Ltd. https://shipwrecksnl.ca/wp-content/uploads/Conception-Hbr-Shipwrecks-Review-2014.pdf

5. After 52 years underwater, this old whaling ship in Conception Harbour is being drained of fuel. CBC News, July 25, 2020 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/environment-history-whaling-oil-1.5661933

6. Maritime History Archive Public Photo Catalogue, https://mha.mun.ca/mha/pviewphoto/Record_ID/3859

7.Wrecks of Conception Harbour, NL https://pursuitofadventure.ca/wrecks-of-conception-harbour-nl/

Video: a school of capelin next to the SS Shuka

Vide: Diving into a world of lettuce, like we are on the Magic Schoolbus!

Video clip 3. Highlights of our dive on July 4th, 2026

It’s been a while since I saw fit to post anything here.

Like everyone else I’ve been doing my best just to get by, looking at things constantly through a covid lens. Still it’s been all right. If covid inadvertently caused me to spend more time with the fam-jam, then it’s been a good thing.

Things are basically back to normal, and this past weekend we glamour camped with some friends of ours at Banff… both families stayed in trapper tents. I had a CWRA water conference to attend during the week, so Sunday after Kristien and the kids went back home I had a bit of time to kill and I went for a solo hike by myself above Canmore on Grotto mountain. I tried to do the ascent quickly to use as training for a trail race in the Crowsnest Pass in 2 weeks called the Minotaur.

It was raining lightly at the beginning of the hike around 8:30, but true to spotwx’s prediction, it stopped at 9 AM and although it was very cloudy, I stayed dry. Every now and then the clouds would clear up though and it was quite pretty. I only came accross a couple of other hikers during the day, so hiking on rainy days does have its benefits.

*EDIT* Of course I came down with Covid right after attending the CWRA conference over June 5-8 ... the first big public event I had attended in 2 years. It was bad but I recovered enough to do the Minotaur 2 weeks later in the CNP on June 25th. Maybe it was stupid to jump back on the horse that quickly, as I was feeling sick pretty much up until the day of the race. I figured I would push hard but if necessary would just DNF, and that is what happened. Oh well. I wasn`t going to win it, but I did go back and finish the following year in 2023.*