Divers document decay of sunken tug in Victoria’s Inner Harbour

Divers capture images of the M.V. Queen, a sunken tug that built in 1913 that sank in 1993. The wreckage is still there today.

Last weekend, Divers from the Underwater Archaeological Society of British Columbia visited an old acquaintance that they haven’t seen since 2013— a sunken tug that lies on the sea floor of Victoria’s Inner Harbour.

Jacques Mark is the Society’s exploration director and says the M.V. Queen was built in 1913 at a shipyard in New Westminster and has a rich history working the coastline of Southern Vancouver Island.

“It spent 50 years towing log booms and barges up and down the coast,” said Mark.

In 1973 the M.V. Queen was converted to a liveaboard residing in Fisherman’s Wharf in Victoria’s Inner Harbour.

“In 1993 it decided to sink,” said Mark.

Victoria’s harbour master at the time worked quickly to contain diesel leaking from the sunken vessel then brought in an excavator to crush the superstructure of the tug. The haul was then raised and dragged around the corner near Ogden Point where it was sunk again.

And that’s where it remains.

“What we noticed is a good chunk of the tug itself, particularly the wooden parts of the boat had deteriorated quite a bit,” said Leila Bautista, the society’s treasurer, describing what the team encountered last weekend.

Bautista also noted that a lot of wrecks have been looted over the years by recreational divers looking for a keepsake.

“The society is actually there for conservation efforts, to try to promote awareness, but also for folks to know to look and not touch,” she said, adding the society hopes people will pause and consider the “heritage and historical significance” of the sunken vessels before trying to snag a souvenir.

The society is putting the final touches on plans for a series of dives along Southern Vancouver Island’s coast between Sidney and Sooke

“There’s about 100 vessels in that stretch of coastline of which we are looking at 20,” said Mark.

The UASBC dives wrecks off the coast of B.C. to monitor their deterioration, take measurements of the sites, find exact GPS coordinates of where the wreckage lays and photo-document the findings.

“The end result is we pull together a chapter on each vessel and we publish the results in what we call a regional shipwreck inventory,” said Mark. “We like to monitor the progress of the wrecks.”

Those reports are available to the public through the UASBC’s website.

The M.V. Queen is one of those wrecks that the society will dedicate a chapter to in its next report, documenting what is too often lost to time.