Scuba diving on Vancouver Island offers world-class cold-water experiences where vibrant marine life meets dramatic underwater landscapes. This site guides divers through the top dive sites, local stories, photos, weather, and everything else you need to explore Vancouver Island scuba diving safely and confidently.
Flora Islet, off the south end of Hornby Island, is another one of the great dive sites one can find here on Vancouver Island. This dive site is accessed only by boat, and is highly recommended for advanced level divers only.
This site also boasts the potential for seeing the normally deep-dwelling and reclusive six gill sharks, that for some unknown reason suddenly appear during the summer months. These giants can grow to 16ft (5m) long, and are just one of the draws to this great dive site.
There are a couple of permanent buoys for tying up, or there is a large shallow shelf that makes for a safe and easy anchorage.
We recently dove there and found several different kinds of fish, like spiny dogfish, ratfish, painted greenlings, all kinds of rockfish, and even giant schools of what were probably juvenile herring.
There is an almost sheer wall that you drop over as a sudden transition from the shallow shelf where the anchorages are. Mind your buoyancy!
We went towards Hornby Island, working into a mild current as we slowly dropped down the wall to just over 100ft (30m).
The visibility was spectacular, as it often is as you get a little more north on Vancouver Island, and this day was no exception. Alas, we saw no six gill sharks on our visit to this great dive site, but it was still an awesome dive that comes highly recommended by many of Vancouver Island's avid cold water diving enthusiasts.
You can easily reach the site on your own launching at Deep Bay Marina, or there are charters available from Hornby Island. Either way, and any way you do it, just be sure to put this great dive on your bucket list of ''must do'' dives. I can guarantee you will not be disappointed!
Cheers and safe diving.