First off, there are a few ways to get to Canada's Ocean Playground, a.k.a. Nova Scotia. You can drive around through New Brunswick, fly in or take a ferry from either Portland or Bar Harbor (bah hah-buh), Maine. Given the choice, try this: Drive to Bar Harbor and take The Cat to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. This is a ferry ride not to be missed.MOOSE DIVING After a 200-mile haul from Truro to Sydney, Cape Breton's major city, we pull up to the hotel and make plans to meet our dive host, Ken Jardine of Scuba Tech. An hour later, we're setting up our dive itinerary and meeting the locals while Ken regales us with some uniquely northern dive tales. Then there was the time when we had to go get a moose out from under the ice. 'Scuse me? Well, it had fallen through the ice right atop a pretty rich oyster bed, eh? And they didn't want the carcass polluting the bed, so ... Jardine has a video of a moose seemingly suspended in a running position underwater, so we come to realize that he isn't, err, horsing around with the Yanks. Definitely a different level of dive experience has our new buddy Ken.UNDERWATER Shore diving on Cape Breton is a bit different from traditional shore diving: The coastline tends to drop precipitously within a literal stone's throw from dry land, so inflatable diving is not only practical but also often preferable. Our first dive is the wreck of the Evelyn, a steel steam schooner that somewhat recalls the BVI's Rhone. The Evelyn isn't as intact, but that's the feeling I get. The Evelyn foundered in 1913 in about 50 feet of water. You can see what remains of her screw - all the blades were broken off by the sunker she hit. A sunker is what the locals call the galaxy's worth of just-below-water rocks that are everywhere. Her spare screw is interred alongside, as is a massive drive shaft, and her huge boiler stands sentry, covered in a Medusa's layer of waving kelp that makes for some great photo ops. We'd reached the Evelyn from Louisbourg Harbor, a cute but not cutesy beach town. The highlight of Louisbourg is the refurbished 1700s French fortress, the largest reconstruction of its type in the world. The waters immediately off the fortress are protected as a national park, and our second dive will take us there to the wreck of the ship-of-the-line, 64-gun Celebre. You can't dive national park waters without a registered guide, and Ken is one of them. And you shouldn't be diving anywhere off Cape Breton without some form of navigation equipment; in this case, Ken has a hand-held GPS unit. There's a reason for this. We motor out to the Celebre under clear blue skies. It's a rather strange feeling to approach the fortress sitting in inflatables and wearing a ton of modern dive gear and very anachronistic since the fortress is so evocative of 200 years ago, even from the water. Before we dive we get a reminder that we are diving up where it can get pretty cold sometimes; the waterproof survey/site map has one entry that notes: Ice berg score. We bail out of the boats and hit the Celebre. Never - and I mean never - have you ever seen so many cannons in your life, nor are you likely to anywhere else. The 153-footer that accidentally burned and sank at anchor is covered in ubiquitous kelp (the park service mows the kelp occasionally), but upon closer inspection the huge ship-shaped debris mound reveals timber decking and framing, cannon after cannon, metal hull frames and anchors - small ones probably from one of the ship's boats. Lobster and hand-size sea scallops abound. We surface into a whiteout: no fortress and no sky, and we can barely see our two crafts anchored together. This should be interesting. We pare down to our drysuits and slowly putt away, following Ken back toward the harbor. We guess. Just as I say to my partner, Great! Next there's gonna be a big hull coming dead at us out of the fog, ta-dah - there's a big hull coming dead at us out of the fog. I goose the throttle before we realize the big hull isn't coming or going anywhere. It's a local dragger hard aground. We circle back and offer assistance, but the three-man crew seems to be rather blasi about the entire issue and declines our offer after thanking us. We head back to the modern harbor and pack it in for the day.IT'S NEVER BEEN THIS BAD Smack in the middle of Cape Breton is a body of water called Bras d'Or (bruh-dor) Lake. A lake it isn't, since it's open to the sea on both sides, but huge it is. Ken tells us that the flow of water in and out of Bras d'Or provides Cape Breton waters with an envelope of warmer water. It's an hour-long drive from Sydney to the Grand Narrows Train Bridge, our next dive. With the permission of the bridge operator, we walk out on the tracks and peer down into the clear water below, a unique way of doing a dive recon. Ken points out the huge barge that sank at the spot and upon which the newer bridge was built atop. Some of the pilings go straight through it. That's a helluva current pushing through there, I note. Yeah. We'll take our time suiting up, answers Ken. Should be slack by then. Once we cross the first channel, the pilings and the hull break up most of the current. We'll just have to really push across, and then you can eddy dive behind everything. Yeah, I've heard that one before. Nonetheless, the current's still pushing, and we grab the bottom and speed-fin across to the bridge's first span, then drop down to around 50 feet. This is a beautiful dive, but the current is kicking. The former barge was carrying gypsum when it sank sometime around the turn of the century, but at some time in its history she must have been a wave-skipping schooner because we eventually make our way out to a beautiful, classic, champagne-glass stern complete with wooden railing. The current keeps the flora down on the pilings and the ship, but you'll encounter a huge wall at one point that is the ship's hull, and you can weave in and out of her decking and framework. This, combined with the bridge pilings and the ambient light filtering down through the water (visibility is an extraordinary 40 feet or so, and has been at least that at every site we dive) on a palette of sponges, urchins, stars, invertebrates, kelp and other soft coral-looking matter, provides a cathedral atmosphere to the undertaking. Schools of big cod patrol all around, wondering what the hell the big awkward critters are doing, and tons of very big perch can be drawn to you by simply crushing an urchin. Jardine says the bottom is at 55 feet, but I spot a large grouper-looking fish which no one can identify (Greg says it resembles a Spanish hogfish) in one of the holds, and it's seems to be at least at 65 feet. Did I mention the current was pushing? Ken and I are having a fairly simple go of it, but Greg, housing in one hand and strobe in the other, is getting his butt kicked. I never fully appreciated the difficulty an underwater photographer must overcome to get shots until this moment. We finish the dive after running the length of the 200-foot barge. That was slack? I ask Ken. I've got about 100 dives here, and that was twice as bad as I've ever encountered, he responds (a Cape Breton version of you shoulda been here yesterday). We load up and, inflatables in tow, head for the town of Baddeck and the wreck of the Yankee. Baddeck's another pretty seaside resort town, and the RCMP have a big patrol vessel in town for Canada Day celebrations. The Yankee is a 20-minute run out of Baddeck and is a most unusual dive. It is buoyed, but it's easier to pull right onto shore and gear up at the picnic tables in the pristine little wilderness cove. Again, the water clarity allows you to view the entire wreck from the surface, even with the flat light we were experiencing. Lot's of whoa, check that out cries when you realize you're looking at a complete wood schooner lying in about 25 feet of water (one mast stub comes to within 5 feet of the surface) about 20 feet off the nearest pine tree. This is a fun dive. The wreck is penetrable, and the stairways and deckhouse are still aboard, but be forewarned: This is buoyancy-control city. The Yankee is covered in soft, exploding silt that will shoot vis down to near zero in a moment, and there's no current to clear it. GOING BACK Time constraints mandated missing dives we didn't want to miss - including the wreck dive scene down around Halifax - but the dives we did manage to get in were all superb. The people were great, the scenery ran from quaint European to primeval Jurassic, and you really can't beat the prices. Me? I'm going back. I want to dive with seals on Bird Island; there are a zillion more wrecks to do from Cape Breton down to Yarmouth; there's the railroad bridge again; and there's a ferry wreck Ken mentioned in passing - it's deep but mighty intriguing. Up north, out east, down west - whatever. I'm definitely going back. 'Sides, I still have some toonies and one-ees, err, loonies to spend. Eh?