Scuba Night Dives In Ontario
With water visibility at many Ontario dive sites (not including Georgian Bay) being terrible during summer months, one might ask — why bother with doing scuba night dives here? Well last night I took one of our group divers Ronnie for his first night dive ever. I chose to do a night dive at Shanty Bay this year since it has an easy access to the water.
Sunset was at 8 pm so we went into the water at 7:45 pm in order for any daylight to end while we are already into our dive. The vegetation near the pier was quite heavy so we couldn’t find the line we installed so we just went straight out until we came across one of the underwater features. This was the point where the fish action was absolutely INSANE! All the bigger fish including the bass, perch and even carp were all hanging around from about 20 feet to 40 feet depth where the skeleton coffin and boat are. Instead of being around the vegetation at the shallows, the fish were mainly in the open water.
This night dive reminded me why I’ve been doing night dives for most of my diving career so far. It’s the marine life action that is often seen at night which divers can seldom see during daylight dives. Also, many of the fish were in their sleep state so we were able to get within inches without them swimming away. I recall the last group night dive we did which was at Humber Bay and we also saw more fish along the entire route than we usually do during day dives there. Previous to that night dive, we also did Welland a few years ago and the fish inside the wreck there were also in their dreamy state.
Ronnie really liked his first night dive and I told him that tropical water night dives will be even better because of superior visibility as well as even more marine life. I try to do a night dive on every tropical dive trip I go on because of this. The night dive at Shanty Bay is definitely a repeat for our group next dive season.
