ARSBC bought HMCS Chaudière from Canada’s Defence Department for $1 plus 7 cents GST; after its reef conversion, glass tunicates came to cover much of the vessel

A dollar and seven cents was the total cost of a 366-foot warship; no auction, and next to no paperwork beyond that seven cents of tax. It is bizarrely a true story: The Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia (ARSBC), a tiny Vancouver-based non-profit organization, purchased HMCS Chaudière, a retired Canadian destroyer escort, for the same price from the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND). But it was not a scrapyard or museum plaque that the ship was travelling to. It was headed straight to the bottom of the ocean, on purpose.

Shipwrecks are not just doom-and-gloom backstories for scuba diving enthusiasts. According to a 2023 review titled “Shipwreck ecology: Understanding the function and processes from microbes to megafauna,” published in the journal BioScience by Paxton et. al., and affiliated with NOAA's ocean science program, shipwrecks found all over the world serve as actual ecological machines: ecosystems inhabited by all forms of aquatic life, from microorganisms to macrofauna.

It is estimated that there are three million shipwrecks scattered across the planet's oceans, and there's a surprising number of research projects that are finding that more is coming from many of these wrecks than meets the eye. The Chaudière's second life may be seen as a rather hopeful tale for a generation with a history of climate anxiety and documentaries about ocean plastic.


The navy's cheapest, weirdest real-estate deal

HMCS Chaudière was a Restigouche-class destroyer escort, built at Halifax Shipyards and commissioned into Canada's navy in 1959. After more than 14 years in service, she was decommissioned in 1974 and kept around afterward mainly as a source of spare parts for her sister ships. In 1989, her sister ship HMCS Kootenay collided with a merchant vessel (a bulk carrier) and suffered serious bow damage. Chaudière, by then a long-retired, non-operational hulk, not a ship at sea, didn't collide with anything herself; she simply had her own bow removed so it could be grafted onto Kootenay as a repair. Not the kind of retirement they would've been expecting.

She was then sunk in Sechelt Inlet, off the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, on December 5th, 1992, near Kunechin Point, by the ARSBC. Chaudière was the first ship to be converted by the Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia into a reef, and the start of a program to convert obsolete steel hulls into dive sites rather than trash dumps.

When barnacles take over the bridge

The ARSBC notes that the whole hull was covered with glass tunicates and now orange plumose anemones and schools of rockfish are known to be present in the passageways where sailors used to stand watch. Environment Canada ran baseline and follow-up surveys of the site starting in 1993, in the months right after the sinking, not to assess the ship beforehand, but to establish a starting reference point immediately after Chaudière went down, against which the site's contamination levels and marine colonization could be tracked over the following years. Such a takeover is not exclusive to one ship.

A 2007 peer-reviewed report titled “Fish assemblages on sunken vessels and natural reefs in southeast Florida, USA,” in the journal Hydrobiologia, by Jordan and Spieler, compares the fish populations on sunken ships to those on nearby natural reefs off southeast Florida and concludes that, at the time of that study, fish communities on sunken vessels can match and sometimes out-compete those found on natural reefs. Separately, a 2022 study titled “Are Sunken Warships Biodiversity Havens for Corals?,” published in the journal Diversity, conducted by Asner and colleagues, found that as of that study, World War II-era warships at Bikini Atoll and Chuuk Lagoon currently support coral diversity on an average of about two-thirds of that found on natural reefs nearby.

That comparison is a tropical, coral-reef one, though, and doesn't transfer directly to Chaudière: Sechelt Inlet is a cold, temperate coastal water where corals don't grow at all, and the marine life colonizing the wreck with tunicates, anemones, rockfish, is a completely different ecological community from a coral reef. The Bikini and Chuuk findings are worth citing here only as evidence of the same broader pattern in a very different climate: old warships, whatever ocean they're in, tend to become unusually productive habitat. It seems like old boats actually make great landlords.

But not everyone was cheering, though

It’s not a neutral activity to sink a warship for the mere purpose of ocean beautification. The Environment Canada

surveys mentioned above were run in part because some members of the Sechelt Indian Band Council expressed concerns regarding the possibility of shellfish contamination in the vicinity of the sinking location. Two years later, the Sechelt Indian Band Council objected to plans for creating a second artificial reef in the same location since the local communities had not been adequately consulted the previous time.

Sitting with that tension is worth it. The idea of converting decommissioned military equipment into a ‘reef' is definitely eco-friendly, but it is also a far more cost-effective solution for the government than the complete dismantling and recycling of a ship on land, raising a legitimate question of whether a ‘reef' is really a restoration, or simply a convenient dump. The $1.07 price tag on the ship itself doesn't mean the project was free, either; ARSBC's own conversion work was funded largely by community donations after government funding for the program was cut, so real money and real risk went into turning a warship into a dive site.

A hopeful story, or convenient excuse?

Probably both. The Chaudière truly became a sanctuary for all sea creatures and a bucket list dive destination for divers looking for something different from a reef cutout at an aquarium. But her story is also a reminder that we must put the same pressure on our feel-good environmental solutions that we put on any other. The cost of $1.07 is a bit too good to be true, and it's the ocean that suffers from whatever we leave behind.