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 that 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 guy hauling a tripod up a boardwalk at golden hour. Ten nautical miles from Port Hardy, off-grid, boat or seaplane only, and run by the same family ethos for over twenty-five years.
The morning I flew the drone through a hole in the fog. The cove sits tucked out of the strait’s weather.
Hurst Island and its neighbours at golden hour — ten nautical miles and one world from Port Hardy.
The cove at dusk. Generator power, boardwalk commutes, and the only light pollution is the galley window.
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. 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.
The Hurst Isle at the dock — workhorse, dive platform and grocery run in one hull.
Slack tide is an appointment the ocean makes and you keep.
What I did not expect was 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.
Pizza night. The sign is hand-painted; so, effectively, is the pizza.
Post-dive charcuterie, dock edition.
The panna cotta in question.
The cabins are simple and right: wood-panelled rooms, a corner bed in a window bay with the dock below, everything drying somewhere warm.
My room for the week. The window bay is where the batteries charged and the plans got made.
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.
Surface interval, done properly.
The channel behind the resort at low tide, from the drone.
The trail behind the cabins, an hour before the afternoon dive.
The foreman.
Site management.
Be honest with yourself about the cold: this is 8-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 film
The 360° virtual tour I built for the resort walks the boardwalk, the cabins and the dive deck — worth ten minutes before you book.
