Underwater explorers have uncovered two previously undocumented shipwrecks on the floor of Belcarra's Bedwell Bay and questions of their origins are just now beginning to rise to the surface.
Divers with the province's Shipwreck Exploration Team, a group that works closely with the Underwater Archaeological Society of B.C. (UASBC), first came upon evidence of the wrecks in March while poring over sonar scans of Bedwell Bay. They were preparing to film a mini documentary about the four well-known wrecks on the bottom of the bay for the UASBC when they found two new ship-shaped anomalies on the detailed scans.
"This bay has been dove for years - it's one of the more popular dives sites in Vancouver - and we were just shocked that there's two clear shipwrecks sitting there," said Chris Fenton, a Shipwreck Exploration Team diver and the UASBC director.
And so, members of the exploration team did some preliminary dives last month to pinpoint the exact locations of the wrecks, although they were only able to find one of the boats, a fairly modern steel barge at a depth of about 85 feet.
But on April 9 and 10, a larger dive team set out to find, measure and shoot video of the sunken vessels, and discovered that the second boat is a much older, 60-metre wooden vessel sitting at a depth of 105 feet and likely dating from the early 1900s.
"We think it probably went down in the 1920s or '30s but getting an ID on it will be tricky because all we have are old images showing dozens and dozens of ships in there," Fenton said.
Now officially known to the exploration team as "Mystery Barge" and "Mystery Wreck," the two vessels sit near the western and eastern shores of Bedwell Bay, respectively.
The old images to which Fenton refers are from the periods between the First and Second World Wars and after WWII, when Bedwell Bay was home to Canadian and U.S. warships awaiting reassignment to civilian duties such as fishing and tugging, or awaiting decommissioning and scuttling.
"It's a large area, sheltered and was pretty handy from the main [Vancouver] harbour to just drag boats around and park them there," said Ralph Drew, Belcarra's mayor and an historian. "So it's going to be a lot of legwork in going through old records to see what was disposed of when... but they've been pretty successful in the past."
The four other ships known to be at the bottom of Bedwell Bay include a 110-foot wooden-hulled American submarine chaser originally launched in Massachusetts on April 19, 1943, and later repurposed as the Western Dispatcher, a fish-packing vessel off the B.C. coast. She is joined on the sea floor by a wreck that has come to be known as the "Sealing Schooner," a small, officially unidentified wooden schooner; the steel-hulled, steam-driven SS Amur (aka SS Famous), built in Sunderland, England in 1890 and sunk in the deep waters of Bedwell south of Farrer Cove in 1932; and the YMS-159 Minesweeper, a 136-foot U.S. warship built in 1943 and only identified as the vessel sunk in Bedwell Bay by UASBC researcher Jacques Marc in 1984.
