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Vancouver Island vs The Great Barrier Reef: My 2 cents worth.
These are two world class dive sites that are world's apart. So how do you pick one over the other?
Live Aboard: Pick the Sea Venturer and Vancouver. Nothing against the folks in Australia, but Captain Chris and Mate Belinda made the trip. Warm, friendly, and just plain fun. Fabulous food. We felt like we were guests in their home instead of customers on a boat.
Surface Interval: Pick Vancouver. British Columbia is nothing if not spectacular. Rugged islands carved into pieces by the Goletas Channel, covered with dense spruce forest. Bald eagles, killer whales, seals, deer. Vancouver island is absolutely breathtaking. I know the naked grandmother took my breath away. The GBR has nothing to compare.
Viz: Pick the GBR. The warm sunny weather in Vancouver was our undoing. If we had had the rain and overcast skies, viz would have been in the 60-80 ft range. We did have one dive with close to 60 ft viz and it makes a difference - but we were happy to have the nice weather for the surface interval. In Australia, you don't have to choose between sun and viz. A big difference between the GBR and Vancouver is the lighting. 132 ft down at Osprey Reef and it was like high noon; 80 ft down in Vancouver and it was dark as pitch. In Australia you need a light to dive at night; in Vancouver, a light was nice and sometimes essential for day dives.
Water Temp: Pick the GBR. We're all tough quarry divers so cold water doesn't bother us. Right? I must confess, the 9AM dive was a real wake up call. With 3 dives a day, most of us were getting out of the water cold after 45 minutes or so. And it's hard to say bad things about the 82 degree water in Australia. Were it not for Capt. Chris, Vern and I would have missed a bunch of dives when we tore neck and wrist seals. With warm water, you're not at risk of missing the show because a piece of latex decided to give out.
Fish: Pick the GBR. The GBR has millions if not billions of fish. There were surprisingly few fish in Vancouver. In 13 dives I might have seen a few thousand fish.
Coral: Pick the GBR. Vancouver has soft coral out the wazoo, but there were sites that lacked diversity. Snowball and Snow Fall were carpeted with gorgeous white anemones that looked like 3 ft tall bird baths. I felt like I was diving the soft powder at Aspen. But these anemones so dominated the seascape that after 10-15 minutes it got old. The soft coral in Australia is more diverse and it has the extra added attraction of hard coral.
Invertebrate Life: Toss Up. Both sites have more small critters than you can count, including nudibranchs.
Misc Marine Critters: Toss Up. It depends what turns you on. The GBR offers sharks, eagle rays, barracuda, enormous parrot fish and potato cod, not to mention huuuge schools of fish. Vancouver offers octopus and the wolf eel. It's an apples and oranges comparison. What I said after my trip to Australia holds for Vancouver: Divers love the small stuff, but when they get back on board, the conversation quickly turns to the large stuff.
Getting There: Pick Vancouver. The US dollar is strong against both the Canadian and Australian dollar so there's no particular advantage to either place based on the currency. But it costs more in airfare and time (and jet lag) to make the journey Down Under. Vancouver was about 8 hrs by air, not counting layovers; Australia is 20 hrs. away You can go to Vancouver for a week like we did, but you're wasting your time if you try to do Australia in less than 2 weeks.
So, pick your poison - it's all good diving.
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