Two divers who died after a deep-water dive at a popular dive site near Nanaimo’s Departure Bay have been identified by the B.C. Coroners Service.
The men are Robert Scott Young, 60, from Olympia, Wash., and Harold John Burkholder, aged 38, from Kent, Wash.
Young and Burkholder and an unidentified 47-year-old man were attempting a deep technical dive in an area known as “the wall” at Snake Island, a small island just east of Nanaimo Harbour, about 3 p.m. on Oct. 11, when something went awry, according to coroner Matt Brown.
The 47-year-old man surfaced and survived.
Young returned to the surface but collapsed shortly after and could not be resuscitated, the coroner said.
Burkholder did not surface. Emergency crews took to the air and water in a massive search but hours later he was determined to be missing and presumed dead.
His body was located two days later — recovered Oct. 13 at a depth of about 78 metres or 256 feet by a commercial diver who was assisting the RCMP.
The B.C. Coroners Service and RCMP continue to investigate this death. The families of both men have been notified.
Coroners spokeswoman Barb McLintock explained on Monday that recovery divers were fortunate to know basically where Burkholder was near the wall and the approximate depth which required a diver with special skills.
Recovering all the gear from the divers will help determine what happened, McLintock said. “In every scuba death, we seize all the equipment and dive computer,” she said. “That gives us a lot of information about what went wrong, which is the next question.
“This could have been a medical event, an equipment event, something not right with the equipment, we don’t know.”
Sea Dragon Charters, the Vancouver-based company that organized the dive, has not commented publicly on the incident.
Snake Island is a popular site for divers due to its cold, clear water.
Close to one side of the island, divers can explore two old navy destroyers — HMCS Saskatchewan and HMCS Cape Breton — that were scuttled to form artificial reefs in 40 metres of water.
A Nanaimo RCMP officer died while exploring one of the ships during a dive in 2011. An American tourist died at the site in 2008.
In the most recent tragedy, the two men died on what’s called Snake Island Wall, a shallow shelf area that drops to an extremely deep depth.
“We’ve taken thousands of people there over the years,” Ed Singer, owner of Sundown Divers in Nanaimo, saud Sunday.
The site is popular and the water has a range of depths, according to Singer, who has more than 25 years’ experience in the area.
Novice to advanced divers use the site, however, the deeper water requires a more advanced level of training, Singer said.
Recreational divers in Canada can dive only to a depth of 40 metres, or 130 feet. However, many people now seek to be certified as technical divers, so they can dive at depths closer to 90 metres using helium mixtures, Singer said.
Typically, there are only one or two diving deaths a year on the West Coast, he said.
“Diving is a very, very safe sport, but there are rules you have to follow,” Singer said. “Even if you follow everything, something could still happen.”
