Avid amateur scuba diver Warren Lo has practised his sport in many tropical hot spots — from coral reefs to shark-filled waters — but he retains a special fondness for diving in Canadian waters.
Formerly a financial advisor with RBC Dominion Securities Inc. for slightly less than 15 years (he’s now working toward becoming a chartered financial analyst), the native of Toronto likes to explore shipwrecks in and around Ontario.
“I was captivated when I saw my first shipwreck in [Lake Huron near] Tobermory,” says Lo, who describes seeing Sweepstakes, a sunken wooden schooner built in the late 1800s as “amazing.”
Lo has been diving since 2003, when a scuba-diving friend encouraged Lo to take a class. He dives all year-round in Canada, even when the water is 2°C to 3°C. If the surface is frozen, he cuts a hole and dives through.
“There are a lot of shipwrecks in Canada, and they’re all in different states of [decomposition],” Lo says. “Most of the ones I’ve seen here in Ontario have hit a rock or gotten caught in a big storm. Some of them even have been artificially sunk to create a dive site.”
Lo estimates there are about 100 known shipwrecks in Ontario waters alone, mostly concentrated around Kingston, Tobermory and Brockville.
Although most divers are not allowed to explore inside shipwrecks for safety reasons, Lo, a certified scuba instructor, has been permitted to enter some of the sites. In that pursuit, divers need to remain calm and methodical if something goes wrong.
“The worst situation I’ve been in was at one of the wrecks, [when] I went into a blind corner unexpectedly,” says Lo. “I had to track my way out slowly, and was able to surface. The worst thing I could have done was panic; but I was able to stop and think about what I needed to do.”
Lo, after training and spending a couple of years developing his diving skills, has taken up underwater photography. He has built up a vast collection of photos.
“If I’m at a shipwreck, I try to capture the essence of the ship,” he says. “How it was at the time it sank. I like to position divers as well in a lot of my shots because it gives me a bit of perspective.”
After a couple of years diving on local shipwreck sites, Lo has travelled to the coral reefs of the Bahamas and Mexico.
“I went for a one-week trip to Cozumel in the beginning of January [in 2004],” says Lo. “The first thing I noticed was how warm it was — the water was 27 degrees Celsius. Then, seeing all these colourful fish and corals — it was quite spectacular. And it was a learning process, because you’re identifying the different critters you can find underwater.”
Recently, Lo decided to expand his photography to include larger, moving subjects on his dives, such as sea lions in California and lemon sharks in Tiger Beach, in the Bahamas.
Now an avid globetrotter, Lo has gone diving in Egypt, Papua New Guinea, California and the Maldives (an island nation in the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka).
Once, in Bonaire, part of an island cluster near Aruba and Curaçao in the Caribbean, Lo and his diving group drove around, marked their entry points with rocks, then jumped into the ocean.
Lo says Bonaire is an island that is perfectly suited to diving: “The reefs run along the shore. You just need to know the topography of the site and understand the timing of the currents and tides, and you’re good to go.”
His most memorable overseas experience, however, was at Truk Lagoon, a sheltered body of water in Micronesia.
“There’s a lot of World War II history [there]. This was a Japanese supply base during the war, but the Americans came in on a surprise attack and bombed it, so everything was sunk.”
Truk Lagoon’s underwater zone, still filled with armaments, ships and aircraft, has been deemed a Japanese national gravesite. Divers are told not to touch or take away anything.
“It was eerie, because it was my first time on a wreck seeing human remains,” says Lo. “The [Japanese government] did clean it up a few years ago, but there are a lot of bones still down there. When you’re swimming through passages and you look into a room inside a shipwreck and you see those remains, you can’t help but think about what happened at the time of the sinking.”
This month, Lo is back in Mexico — but not in scuba gear. He is also a trained spelunker, although he hasn’t yet tried photography inside caves. He looks forward to adding photos of caverns and stalactites to his collection.
Lo says his hobbies have become a running joke among his family members, none of whom dive. “My brother actually is a skydiving instructor,” he says, “so between the two of us, our mom says, we never stay on land.” IE