Northwest Dive Club

Our dives in the Great White North have primarily been on Vancouver Island and the Sunshine coast, in part because most dives near Vancouver require (according to Betty Pratt-Johnson's book) getting permission from the harbormaster's office.
So my questions are: 1) How much of a PITA is this?
2) How much in advance can you call in? And how specific do you have to be? Apparently you can't call on weekends. Can you just say "I want to dive (x) and (y) on Tuesday, (z) on Wednesday," etc. or do you have to give them times?
3) anything else about the process that I should know?
thanks

Are you talking about diving in Indian Arm? Most of the rest of inner and outer harbor are armored shorelines and the boat/float plane traffic basically prohibits recreational diving. Plus the vis is dreadful. Getting permission to dive in Indian Arm is sort of ridiculous (IMO) but normally its no problem to call ahead by a couple working days. In my experience they don't care and sometimes they don't realize they have historic regulations about this. Indian arm has hideous vis outside the fall months, its bloom after bloom because its basically euthrophic. Last time I was there was a few years ago and things may have changed rule-wise.

thanks for the info- yes, we wanted to check out Indian Arm, shouldn't be any blooms this time of year. But it sounds like more hassle than it's worth, so we're just going to stick to Howe Sound.

Plan on doing many boat dives around Howe Sound.. just don't know exactly where yet.

I have been in Indian Arm a couple times. So far its a rather grimy grey. I would go back and check out the upper reaches someday given the chance, those are all boat dives. There's a charter operator there but I don't know the boat name anymore.

Howe Sound is much more interesting to me if you avoid the NW area by the defunct(?) pulp mill and Brittania Beach. While both are coming back from a century+ of pollution they are still relative dead zones.