Tag Archives: DFO

Squirrel Cove Dock Restoration

Harbour Manager Jenny Hartwick described the pile driving procedure as every child’s fantasy of big machinery: loud noises and lots of smoke that comes billowing out. Small Craft Harbours informed Harbour Authority Cortes Island (HACI), who manages the dock, a year and a half ago. The Squirrel Cove dock restoration started on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 4th, 2020.

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Last Fall’s Chum Returns On Cortes & Quadra

Last fall’s chum runs were poor throughout British Columbia. Wilf Luedke, the chief biologist for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, described reports from the Sooke River, on Vancouver Island, as “the worst yet.” On the Fraser River, the Alouette River Management Society counted 500 instead of the 60,000 they expected. The chum returns on Cortes & Quadra Cortes were dismal. 

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How The Basil Creek Culvert Project Is Over The Top

By the time you hear this, the Ministry of Transportation crew will have left Basil creek. As Cortes Streamkeeper Cecil Robinson observed, prior to this “if the fish came early and the rains were late, they just simply couldn’t get through the old culvert. They died right there.” Now more of them will swim upstream to their spawning grounds. Then he proceeded to describe how the “Basil Creek culvert project was over the top from the very beginning. Everything that needed to be done, is done: and then some more, always some more.”

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Turn It In Week

For the past eight years Gorge harbour residents, on Cortes Island, have been cleaning up the aquaculture debris, left by industry, at their own expense. This was sometimes a source of tension between property owners and industry. Barry and Amanda Glickman, who organized these annual clean-ups, said the first year they hauled away three truck loads of debris. The most recent clean-up was last May. Now the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) is stepping in and, in partnership with industry, will be holding Turn it in Week between September 11-15, 2017.

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Alexandra Morton on Salmon Farms

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Alexandra Morton followed a pod of resident Orcas up the coast of Vancouver Island in 1984. She found the ideal base for further studies at Echo Bay. When the first fish farms moved into the area three years later, she thought they were a good idea. Since then, she has becomes the foremost opponent of British Columbia’s fish farms. I recently interviewed Alexandrea Morton on fish farms.

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