Welcome to Total Bottom Time!

Total Bottom Time is my online personal dive log. A place where I can share my dives with friends, family, other divers, and the world. You can find out a bit more about me and see my full log of dives by clicking on my profile on the right. Feel free to subscribe to my dives via email or RSS.

Below are just some of my latest dives.

Our second dive in the St. Lawerence river was very close to shore at the Centeen Memorial Dive Park. Creation of the park started in 2015 with the assistance of the City of Brockville, as well and the students of the local schools who constructed many of the statues. The park centres on five human sculptures looking upward as a memorial to those who have lost their lives on the busy St. Lawrence seaway.

Memorial Statues

Surrounding the memorial statues the park has many more statues laid out in concentric circles for easy navigation. 

Centeen Park Dive Sive

I found this little crawfish hanging out on one of the park benches. There wasn't a lot of wildlife in the area so it was good to find something down there.

Crawfish

We continued to explore the site and stopped to check out almost all of the statues.

Sturgeon

Concrete clownfish

Boozer

Boozer

Couple

Mermaid

There was even a structure spelling out SOS (Save Our Shipwrecks). An initiative to protect the shipwrecks in the area. It provided a good opportunity to practice buoancy by doing swim-throughs of the letters. The visibilty here was better than on the Daryaw but it was ...

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I was in Ontario for the 150th Canada Day celebration. I took the opportunity to do some diving with Dive Brockville where they have some amazing wreck diving on the St. Lawerence River. This was actually my very first dive in Canadian waters!

Dive boat

Our ship's captain, Vincent, explained that the reason for number of wrecks is that squalls can swoop in very rapidly and unexpectedly. Ships caught unaware can be forced out of the channel and onto rocks near the shoreline or crash into any one of the literally 1000 islands. The St. Lawerence River is littered with islands like the one below.

 

Island

The dive was on the Henry C. Daryaw. While crossing a shoal around Crossover Island on Nov. 21, 1941 she tore a large gash in her starboard side. Numerous salvage attempts to pull her more firmly on to the shoal (with cables from steam tractors on the cliff) failed when the cables broke and she slipped upside down to the bottom of the shoal with her bow facing upstream. Dive Brockville has this great page with all of the wrecks they frequent.

The current was fairly strong and the visibility low due to ...

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The final dive of the cruise was another easy drift dive in Cozumel. A great dive with plenty of wildlife to see along the drift.

The highlight of the dive was this Juvenile Spotted Drum Fish. 

The way it uses it's fins for propulsion gives it the appearance of dancing through the water. 

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