Members of the Royal Canadian Navy and their international partners returned to Sheridan Lake this year to conduct ice diving exercises from March 8 to 12.
ICEDIVEx is a training exercise the Navy runs annually to give their divers experience diving in frozen lakes. Joining them this year were members of the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy, the Royal Netherlands Navy Diving Group and the U.S. Navy Mobile Diving and Salvage Company from Hawaii. Lt. Alexander Castagna, the officer in charge of Ice Dive Exercise 24, said this year’s exercise went off without a hitch.
“It’s really to hone our ice diving skills and satisfy a readiness requirement of our unit to be able to dive under the ice,” Castagna explained. “We invite the internationals to let them see how we operate in a cold weather environment.”
An Ontario native, Castagna joined the Navy 11 years ago to study chemical engineering before becoming a naval warfare officer, choosing clearance diving as his specialty. Clearance diving includes underwater salvage, recovery operations, mine countermeasures and explosive ordinance disposal.
Over the last three years since becoming a clearance diver officer, Castagna said the culture of the military diving community has been very satisfying to be around. He noted that everyone is a hard worker so it’s easy for him to love his job.
That’s also been the experience of Sailor First Class Alexandra Lepage who attended the exercise. Growing up in Montreal, Quebec she was a competitive swimmer for 15 years before joining the Navy in 2019.
“I had finished school and I was a bit lost. I didn’t know what I wanted to do as a professional career. A friend of mine told me I could be a diver in the Navy,” Lepage said. “I applied and a couple of months later I joined the Navy as a reservist and I’ve been pretty much full-time since 2020.”
Lepage said she feels more confident underwater and enjoys sharing her passion for swimming and diving with other people. She primarily works as a port inspection diver in Vancouver, responsible for inspecting the hulls of ships.
“We will do salvage but we’re here to support the fleet. Every time a Canadian ship needs an inspection or a hull search, just to make sure the boat is clear, we will be tasked with doing that,” Lepage explained. “If a foreign country’s ship comes into the harbour we need to make sure the bottom is clear and the jetty is clear so the ship can dock safely.”
Castagna said the Navy chose Sheridan Lake for the second year in a row because of its relative proximity to Vancouver Island and the facilities that Sheridan Lake Resort supplies. Being able to house everyone close to the actual dive site makes the operation go smoother.
In addition to learning how to cut a hole in the ice and properly conduct the dive, Castagna said those in attendance also got the chance to practice using snowmobiles and a decompression chamber. Diving under the ice is fairly similar to diving in the ocean, he observed, the main difference being the set-up beforehand.
To dive under the ice Castagna and his team have to cut a hole in the ice in a specific way, set up a tent around the hole to protect the divers from the elements and install heaters to keep their equipment from freezing. That procedure is what they show their international partners.
“We compare the little differences between our procedures and decide what’s the best practices,” Castagna said. “I dived once and it was my first time ice diving.”
Lepage said she enjoyed sharing her knowledge with fellow divers and learning from them in turn.
One of her favourite moments from the exercise was when they did a dive with all the flags of the nations who attended the exercise. Lepage said divers took the flags underwater and using weights posed so they appeared to be standing on the bottom of the ice with the flags flying. This exercise also marked her first-time ice diving.
“Everything was very exciting and safe. When you’re underwater it’s like Castagna said, it’s the same, you just can’t really come up whenever you want. That’s why you have good communication with someone on the surface,” Lepage said. “That’s very comforting, in a way, because you’re always in contact with everyone on the surface.”