Friends realize free-diving dream of swimming under frozen ocean in Brentwood Bay

Central Saanich, B.C. -

Murrin Bewick beams as she walks down the icy dock towards a frozen ocean, preparing to realize a diving dream, after receiving a message from a far-from-fair-weather friend.

“When Ethan asked me if I wanted to go ice-diving, it was like, ‘Yes!’” Murrin laughs.

Her friend Ethan Pang — who proudly agrees he’s an “ocean nerd” and decorated his ceiling with prints of some of the creatures he’s encountered under the sea — had launched his drone over the ocean when the temperature hit record lows this week.

“Oh we were just so pumped,” Ethan laughs.

When he looked at the footage he saw that Brentwood Bay was covered in thick ice.

“I thought I had to go to Iceland to ice dive,” Murrin says. “It’s pretty special to do it in my own backyard.”

While Murrin was surprised to jump into the icy ocean and have slush slide down her snorkel and into her mouth (“I had a brain freeze it was so cold!”), Ethan made a conscious effort to break off a piece of ocean ice and take a big bite (“Surprising, it did not taste as salty as I thought”).

Before they dived deep into the water, the friends had fun frolicking on the ice above it.

“We probably looked like goofballs,” Murrin laughed, after they filmed themselves sliding over the surface and intentionally falling through the ice.

“People were shouting, ‘Are you OK?’” Ethan smiles. “(We replied) ‘We’re fine thank you!’”

The pair are experienced divers, who share their adventures on social media — Ethan at ethan2wild.underwater and Murrin at murr.db.

While Ethan and Murrin couldn’t have felt been better, flopping about like seals, and rolling around like logs, nothing could beat that moments they found themselves diving under the ice.

“The noise just goes away,” Murrin says. “It’s completely silent.”

While Murrin calls it potentially “peaceful” and Ethan says it might have made him “meditative,” he adds, “We were not really in that kind of mood.”

The friends were in the same mood that made some build snowmen, and others sled down hills, the sort of mood that made these experienced divers want to have the most fun, and make the most happy memories during this unprecedented snow day.

“You only live once,” Ethan smiles. “So go for it!”