The argument for Hurst Island was made decades ago by a man in a red toque. Jacques Cousteau rated this reach of Queen Charlotte Strait the best cold-water diving on earth, and the reasoning still holds. Tide squeezes through Browning Pass twice a day hauling nutrients up from the deep, and the walls respond with a density of life that looks like a coral reef which lost its way north: soft corals, yellow sponges, anemones stacked white on white, kelp combing the current.
I went out for a week with God’s Pocket Resort to shoot their film and build their virtual tour, which means I saw the operation from both sides. As a photographer being fed dangerously well, and as the man hauling a tripod up a boardwalk at golden hour.
Ten nautical miles from Port Hardy, off grid, boat or seaplane only, and run on the same family footing for more than twenty-five years.
The cove does the work
Hurst Island sits behind its own weather. The cove is tucked out of the strait, which is why the resort can run a dive schedule in months when the open water outside would not allow one.
Generator power, boardwalk commutes, and the only light pollution is the galley window. There is no road on the island and no reason for one.
The diving runs on the water’s terms. The crew read the tide tables the way other people read the news, and every drop at the pass is planned to slack. The same current that feeds the walls will not negotiate with a schedule.
Slack tide is an appointment the ocean makes and you keep. Everything else on the day is arranged around it.
The boat carries a nitrox membrane system and a high-speed lift, and between dives it becomes a floating lunch room with the best view in the strait.
What I did not expect
The food. Charcuterie on the dock after the second dive. Pizza night under the hand-painted welcome sign. A panna cotta that would survive scrutiny in a city restaurant, served to people in fleece with mask lines still on their faces.
Fed better than the setting suggests
Pizza night happens under a hand-painted sign, and the pizza is effectively hand-painted too. Post-dive charcuterie arrives on the dock while people are still peeling out of drysuits.
None of it is what a remote dive resort is expected to serve, which is the point. A week of diving is a week of being cold on purpose, and the galley is the reason people keep going back in.
Surface intervals belong to the island
There are kayaks on the beach and a trail into second-growth forest hung with moss. I spent one slack-tide gap chasing light through the trees and another photographing a raven that ran the dock like a foreman. The cat, asleep in a camera bag it had annexed, declined to be directed.
Between dives
Kayaks live on the beach and the channel behind the resort empties at low tide into something you can paddle through slowly. It is the correct way to spend the hours you are not allowed to be underwater.
Nitrogen has opinions about back-to-back dives, so the surface interval is not optional. Having something worth doing in it is what separates a dive resort from a dive boat.
Management
The raven works the dock like a foreman, and has clearly been doing it longer than most of the staff. It is entirely unbothered by a lens.
The cat had annexed a camera bag by the second morning and declined all direction thereafter. Every remote lodge has one animal that outranks the guests.
Be honest with yourself about the cold. This is eight-degree water and drysuit country, and the winter weeks, when visibility stretches past twenty-five metres, reward divers who have made peace with dry gloves. But no warm-water reef will show you a wall like Browning’s in January, and no liveaboard sends you to sleep with rainforest fifty feet from your pillow.
The 360 degree virtual tour I built for the resort walks the boardwalk, the cabins and the dive deck, and is worth ten minutes before you book.
