British Columbia — Browning Pass

Almost everyone dives this from a lodge rather than a town: a boat transfer out of Port Hardy, then three dives a day, sometimes a fourth after dark, off a small aluminium boat with runs measured in minutes rather than hours. The tide book writes the schedule, since the current-swept sites only work near slack, so dives land at odd hours and meals move to suit, and the crew will change a plan at short notice if the flood arrives early. You stay in the drysuit between dives; the run home is rarely long enough to be worth peeling out of it.

Sites sort into three kinds. The walls start within a couple of metres of the surface and the cover is dense from the top down, so a whole dive can pass inside the first fifteen metres without missing much, which is unusual for diving of this reputation. Pinnacles and boulder reefs off the passes are den country, undercut and occupied. Then there are the tidal rapids over on the mainland side, a much longer run and less a dive than a timed insertion into the few minutes when the water stops moving.

Colour is what people come back for, and it is not only the anemone banks. Strawberry anemones carpet the rock between them in pink and red, encrusting sponge fills what is left in yellow and orange, and bare stone is hard to find on a good wall. In the rapids, gooseneck barnacles crust the rock at Turret Rock, where they are locally noted for unusually red flesh, fed by the same flow that makes the site awkward to dive at all. Photographers shoot wide for the walls and macro for everything else, and still surface with a list of things they had no lens for.

It is a demanding trip in the ordinary sense rather than the technical one. Getting there costs a full travel day, the running season is a summer one, and everything hinges on the crew reading the tide correctly. The diving itself stays shallow, most of it inside 30 m, so what ends a dive is cold and the closing tide window rather than depth or decompression. It suits photographers, divers who care about invertebrates, and anyone who has done enough warm reef and wants something with more texture to it.