“I penetrated Her Majesty’s wreck!”, proudly exclaims our diving instructor’s t-shirt. A much bigger boat than the Rainbow Warrior, the Canterbury was decommissioned, stripped of most sticky-outy bits and deliberately sunk about two years ago just off the coast of the Bay of Islands. As a young wreck, not too many fish have made it their home just yet, although the experts predict that within a few years it’ll easily rival the Rainbow Warrior for colourful reef- and sea life. To give you an idea of its size and scale, you can click here to see a photograph of the HMNZS Canterbury in it’s former glory.

It was a great dive indeed. We got to swim more or less front-to-back, entering the captain’s bridge and helicopter hangar, and poking our heads into some of the other rooms along the way on the rails of the deck. It’s actually quite fascinating to see a complete, perfectly-upright shipwreck underwater — I only wish that we had a ‘proper’ underwater camera with which to bring you photographs. Alas, we don’t.

Two more dives and a theory-recap later and I officially gained my “Advanced” Scuba-diving certificate. Congratulations to me!

We’ve had a lot of fun in the Bay of Islands and the weather–not withstanding one downpour–has been very kind to us too. Now it’s time to leave and we’ve decided to return south and spend our last few days in Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city — and often mistakenly thought of as being the capital (it’s not, Wellington is).

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