For the adventuresome, the underwater world offers vast areas to explore largely free of the hordes of humanity that often populate popular destinations on the surface.
It was this opportunity to explore an entirely different environment, complete with unique creatures that summoned Jody Smith and his wife, Jill, to the sport of scuba diving. Now, many years later, the two operate Adventure Sports Newmarket, having purchased the business under a different name 13 years ago.
While Jill prefers warmer waters where she often wields her camera, Jody’s explorations often focus on local destinations, with many dives exploring shipwrecks. And he doesn’t restrict his outings to hot summer days.
“When I got certified, we started doing a lot of local diving, there’s lots of local diving opportunities in Canada, mostly for shipwrecks, we don’t have a lot of pretty fish in Ontario,” explains the divemaster.
“Typically, the colder the water, the better the visibility,” he says. “This time of year, the water is really cold, but the visibility is awesome, it’s almost like it is in the Caribbean, depending upon where you’re diving, of course. But you can have anywhere from 20 to 80 feet of visibility in the spring.”
Even the middle of winter provides diving opportunities. Smith has a whole protocol around ice diving to ensure the members of any groups he takes out remain safe where neoprene suits are essential. And the water temperature?
Well, he explains, it doesn’t get much colder than the depths of Lake Huron or Georgian Bay near the popular diving destination of Tobermory, off the tip of the Bruce Peninsula in the summer time.
“If you were to go down 100 feet in July, the water temperature is going to be somewhere around 5 to 8 degrees (C),” he says. “When we do ice diving, it’s going to be 1 to 2 degrees probably, colder than that and it’s ice.”
Smith spends a great deal of time in Lake Simcoe checking out the wrecks and his Adventure Sports Newmarket dive boat can often be seen on the surface in local waters. Through the business, the Smiths have a retail store where they supply equipment and do repairs. They also run weekly charters in Lake Simcoe throughout the summer.
They offer training with monthly courses that involve classroom and pool sessions and four open dives, as well as group trips in Ontario and more exotic locales.
“There’s an airplane out there that we dive on. There’s some small little boats that have sunk over the years that we dive on,” he says of the local dives. “There’s also some opportunities at the Toronto harbour that we go out on sometimes. And there’s lots of shore diving opportunities around Lake Simcoe.”
There are regular weekend trips, as well, to Brockville, Kingston, Picton and Tobermory.
His favourite diving destination so far has been Raja Ampat, Indonesia where his group spent 12 days aboard a dive boat exploring the vibrant sea life and coral in 2019. It’s an archipelago made up of 1,500 small islands, cays and shoals.
The Smiths are in the midst of planning a July group trip to Cancun, Mexico. They’ll be snorkelling with whale sharks and diving the rest of the week.
He describes scuba diving as a safe sport with very few accidents reported in Ontario, and none related to his organization, given the training that is necessary along with the rules and regulations that they strictly follow.
Every June, the Smiths run Dive Against Debris, their 'fins on' action collecting garbage out of Lake Simcoe while collecting survey data. Scuba divers, the Smiths say, are perfect for the job.
“No one is better suited to tackle marine debris than scuba divers; we are often the first to see the impact that climate change and human pollution has on the underwater world,” Jill commented in an email.
The event, they call DAD, runs June 9 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at at Bonnie Park in Jackson’s Point and is registered with the PADI AWARE FOUNDATION, a nonprofit that works with scuba divers to protect underwater environments. The Smiths are currently making pans to partner with the York Regional Police marine unit in the cleanup effort.