About Eight North Diving
About our store, team, and mission
The shop we went looking for, then built
Jason Cook and Aaron Speare started talking about this around a campfire on Vancouver Island, late enough at night that it could have stayed an idea. Both had spent years diving cold, remote and technical sites. Both kept running into the same gap once they were home again. Plenty of shops will get you certified and send you off happy. Far fewer are built for the diver who wants to keep going, whose skills have to hold up when depth and conditions stop being forgiving.
So they opened one on Kings Road, and they teach in it themselves.
The name comes from oxygen, element number 8 on the periodic table and the one thing every dive depends on. The logo says it even more clearly, a figure eight drawn as two O2 bubbles.
Trim and buoyancy on day one, not in year five
Steady buoyancy, clean trim, and a rig that works with you instead of against you. People file those under technical skills. They are really just good diving, and there is no good reason to keep them from someone on their first weekend.
We teach them from the first pool session. Not because everyone should go technical, but because a diver who starts that way is calmer, more capable, and better company underwater, whatever they decide to do next. It also means there is nothing to unlearn later, which is where most divers quietly lose a couple of years.
Where we made our home base
Why we stayed in Victoria
We have dived coast to coast and this is where we stopped. HMCS Mackenzie, a Canadian destroyer escort scuttled in Haro Strait, sits a short run north of town. Race Rocks puts you in the water with seals and sea lions. Wolf eels and giant Pacific octopus live close enough that they turn up on ordinary weeknight dives. The range is hard to match anywhere in the country and none of it shuts down for winter, which is worth the extra neoprene.
North of Eight Diving
Eight North grew out of Eight Diving in Des Moines, Washington, one of GUE's affiliated dive centres and the technical hub of the Puget Sound scene. That connection means real experience behind the counter and a network that reaches a long way past Vancouver Island. If the plan is a trip somewhere far off, we can help you get there and dive it properly.
Come and find out
Tell us what you are working toward, either by phone or by walking in. However you end up diving with us, we want you coming off the water feeling one thing above everything else, which is that you accomplished something.