This was the last large sailing ship built in Victoria (1920). It was 236 feet long and 45 feet wide. It had 4 masts and was presumably named after Simon Fraser Tolmie, an early Premier of B.C. Some sources call it a "barquentine", while the hull plans from the shipyard called it a "schooner" . Maybe the difference had something to do with the rigging. I found references to it visiting Hawaii, Fiji and Australia, but eventually (I couldn't find out when) it was sold and converted to a log barge (masts removed, etc.). In early January, 1945 (or late December, 1944) , it sunk off Harrison Island at the Western entrance to Victoria harbour. In the book "Diver's Guide (Vancouver Island South)", it says that the hull broke away from it's moorings in the harbour during a storm and drifted on to the island. This used to be a popular shore dive a few decades ago, but there is now a sign on the beach warning of prosecution/towing/etc. This land opposite the island is Department of National Defence property. The only official way to dive this wreck now is by boat. I took a canoe there in mid-April, 2005 to see what was left of the wreck. My canoe had a little electric outboard, but it was still pretty hairy going over the 4-foot swells and whitecaps outside the harbour. Doing this on a calm day would probably be smarter. There were a few smaller islands next to Harrison island that were covered with harbour seals. I beached my canoe in a narrow little bay on DND property (there was no sign saying I couldn't dive from this particular spot) and swam out to the island. The wreck is on the South-East side of the island (the opposite side of where I was), so I descended and swam around the island underwater. The visibility wasn't great, around 15 feet at the most, but I followed the line where the rocky reef met the sand (around 30 feet deep). There was lots of surfgrass, branching coralline algae and young bull kelp in the shallows. At the bottom near the sand, the area was very similar to Saxe Point. There were a few fish-eating anemones, but not a whole lot else. I did see a quillback rockfish so large, that at first, I thought it was a ling cod. It was blind in one eye. I finally reached the wreck on the border of the rock and the sand ( 35 feet deep at low tide). There wasn't much left except for the metal bolts and the iron "knees" that held the deck to the hull. These knees were sticking up from the sand in a row spaced a few feet apart. They looked like huge, right-angled shelf brackets. The long end (about 6 feet long ) was lying flat on the sand and the short part was sticking straight up for about 3-4 feet. The bolts that held the planks to the knees were still attached along with some bits of wood. All this was over a flat sand bottom. As I swam closer to the island over the rocky reef, the wreckage became a jumbled pile of large (a few feet long) metal bolts. A section of timbers/metal was propped up against a 20-foot high wall. You could swim under here if you weren't afraid of it collapsing on you. Near what used to be the bow, there were two (6-10 feet long) "hawse pipes" (the metal tube that the anchor chain went through). In the more protected parts of the wreck (under metal plates, etc.), I saw "rusticles" like those on the Titanic. There wasn't a lot of life crowding the wreck, but I saw the usual sea stars, hermit crabs, small rockfish, kelp greenlings, a few anemones (plumose and fish-eating), and some small patches of yellow sponge on the knees. Encrusting coralline algae made some of the wreckage look pink. A small school of perch was hanging around, but they were pretty shy. I was hoping to see some seals underwater, but if there were any, the visibility made them invisible. I did two dives here, but the area of wreckage is small enough to see on half a dive, especially with the shallow depths. Back on shore, I saw a bald eagle swoop down and grab a fish from the water, two Canada geese chased a mink across the beach, and a river otter swam by.
